Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert offered three lessons in staging a TV musical

Vox

One lesson is that concert staging works. "The larger lesson is one that all live TV musicals can learn from: Strict photorealism is not your friend," says Constance Grady. "The trick is to borrow from performance styles that already have accepted cinematographies, that audiences know how to watch on television already. We’re used to watching rock concerts on TV. We know what they’re supposed to look like." Another lesson is that sung-through shows, where the audience doesn't have to move between "different layers of artifice and emotional reality" between dialogue and songs, help keep the energy level of viewers high, says Grady. The third lesson is that spectacle is the most important. "In Jesus Christ Superstar Live," she says, "the spectacle was as simple and evocative as the shot of the back of the stage opening up, forming a cross made out of negative space, as Jesus’s cross floats back into the fog. It’s a moment that would do very little in a produced movie, and the effects could be tricky to handle in a theater. But in a live TV musical special, it became the kind of extraordinary, haunting image that future live TV musicals would do well to emulate."

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