Jesus Christ Superstar Review: A Stage That Breathes, Pulses, and Refuses to Stay in the Past
Quick take: Jesus Christ Superstar at The Theatre at Solaire brings Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera into Manila with a staging that feels immediate, physical, and deeply human. Seen during the Gala Night performance on Tuesday evening, May 5, the show turns faith, fame, betrayal, public worship, and private collapse into a theatrical experience that begins with a living stage and ends by asking us to stay inside the humanity of Jesus.
There are productions that begin when the first character enters, and there are productions that begin before anyone says a word. Jesus Christ Superstar at The Theatre at Solaire belongs to the second kind.
More than five decades after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice first turned the Passion story into a rock opera, the show does not arrive in Manila as a museum piece. It arrives with the force of something that has survived because it keeps evolving. Before the story fully declares itself, the stage already seems alive. It breathes. It waits. It pulses.
That pulse goes straight to the heart.
From the overture alone, the staging establishes its hold. The music does not merely announce the show. It pulls us into its bloodstream. Light slowly reveals space. Bodies begin to suggest tension before conflict is spoken. Even the image of the cross feels foreshadowed rather than presented, as if the ending has been breathing inside the beginning all along.
It has been a long while since I enjoyed an overture this much, not only as a musical prelude, but as a theatrical event in itself. There is already story in the lighting. There is already pressure in the bodies. There is already prophecy in the sound.
A Passion story that refuses to stay distant
What makes this Jesus Christ Superstar feel immediate is that it does not try to trap the audience in biblical distance. It does not ask us to look at the story as something preserved behind glass. Instead, it makes the material feel current, volatile, and painfully recognizable. Devotion, fear, betrayal, exhaustion, public worship, private doubt, and the machinery of people turning into symbols all move through the evening with unsettling clarity.
This is where the staging feels most alive. The choreography, vocals, and instruments do not work as separate layers. They collide, answer, and feed each other. The movement is not decorative. It feels like pressure made visible. The band does not simply accompany the performers. It drives the show forward. The vocals do not settle for power alone. They carry texture, contradiction, and strain.
The show is not interested in letting feeling settle gently. It drives you forward, wave after wave, until it finally marinates you in the pain of the 39 lashes.
The pacing also moves with breathless urgency. There is almost no room to bask in one feeling before the next one arrives. At first, that speed can feel overwhelming, as if the show is refusing the comfort of reflection. But eventually, the choice reveals itself. This Jesus Christ Superstar drives you forward until it asks you to remain there, with Jesus, until the end.
That matters for a sung-through work, where there is almost nowhere to hide. Every turn must live inside the music. Here, the songs are not treated as isolated showpieces. They are arguments. Confessions. Warnings. Prayers that do not always know who they are addressed to. The result is less a retelling than a collision happening in real time.
Joshua Bess as Jesus: the person inside the symbol
As Jesus, Joshua Bess gives the evening its center, but what makes the performance compelling is how slowly the wound appears. His Jesus begins with a charisma that feels almost untouchable, the kind of presence that makes it easy to understand why people would follow him, project onto him, and mistake his humanity for certainty. But as the night moves forward, that glow begins to crack. What unfolds is the human being inside the figure, the person inside the symbol, the man inside the crowd’s idea of salvation.
Bess communicates that unraveling with striking clarity. His Jesus carries anger, frustration, love, betrayal, abandonment, and finally, something close to a weary “bahala na” surrender. It is not resignation without feeling. It is the exhaustion of someone who has loved, warned, pleaded, endured, and still finds himself alone at the center of everyone else’s need. Instead of presenting Jesus as serenely removed from the chaos around him, Bess lets us feel the cost of being adored, misunderstood, followed, consumed, and left.
Javon King, Gab Pangilinan, and the people orbiting Jesus
Javon King’s Judas gives the show much of its volatility. Judas is often the role that tells the audience how to enter the musical, and here, that entry point is full of agitation, intelligence, and grief. King does not play Judas as a simple betrayer. He plays him as someone terrified by what he sees happening around Jesus, and possibly more terrified that he may be right.
That tension gives the performance its charge. He is angry, yes, but the anger comes from proximity to love, fear, and disillusionment. His Judas feels like someone arguing against a catastrophe that has already started moving, someone trying to stop history with the force of his own panic.
Gab Pangilinan’s Mary Magdalene becomes one of the production’s emotional anchors. In a show filled with heat, noise, and public pressure, she brings a quieter but no less powerful intensity. Her presence gives the evening space to breathe. She does not soften the story so much as deepen it, reminding us that tenderness can feel radical when everyone else is already moving toward catastrophe.
What makes her performance work is its restraint. She does not overstate Mary’s care, nor does she reduce it to sentiment. Instead, she lets the emotion sit close to the body, close to the voice, close to the ache of someone trying to understand what love means when the person in front of her is being pulled away by history, politics, faith, and fate.
The priests, Pilate, Herod, and the machinery of power
Among the scene stealers, Grant Hodges’ Caiaphas, Kodiak Thompson’s Annas, and the other priests make the political machinery feel especially dangerous, not only because of their authority, but because of the duality in how that authority is performed. In public, they carry themselves with the high and mighty certainty of men convinced of their own righteousness. They appear controlled, elevated, almost untouchable, as if power and doctrine have fused into one polished surface.
But in private, away from public opinion, the mask loosens. There is something wickedly entertaining in watching them become, in Thompson’s own words, almost like a “boy band” behind closed doors: coordinated, theatrical, self-aware, and suddenly bare in their ambition.
Hodges brings Caiaphas a chilling bass authority and the stillness of someone used to power. Thompson’s Annas cuts through with sly, needling precision. Around them, the priests move less like background figures and more like an institution thinking with one body. Their menace is both ceremonial and human, righteous in public and calculating in private. They are not merely surrounding the tragedy. They help build the mechanism that makes it possible.
There are moments that land more quietly than others, though the show’s momentum may be partly responsible. By the time King Herod appears, the audience is already deep inside the story’s suffering. The show has pushed us past spectacle and into dread, which makes it harder to fully receive Herod’s supposed campiness and flamboyance on their own terms.
The scene still serves its function, but it arrives when the room is already too close to Jesus’ pain, too primed for the trial, and too aware of the lashes waiting ahead. Before Herod’s theatricality can fully bloom, the staging throws us back into judgment, violence, and the road to the cross. The moment registers more fleetingly, not because Herod lacks possibility, but because the emotional current has become almost impossible to step out of.
Ethan Hardy Benson’s Pontius Pilate, by contrast, leaves a stronger impression. His presence is rigid, severe, and weighed down by the machinery of law and public consequence. He does not come across as a man free to act with moral clarity, but as someone trapped inside the very system he represents. There is authority in his stillness, but also visible unease, as if every decision must pass through duty, order, reputation, and fear before it can reach whatever remains of his conscience. That severity lingers.
An ensemble that makes the stage feel alive
The ensemble deserves attention for how much of the show’s electricity depends on them. They make the world feel unstable, almost feverish. Their bodies build the temperature of the room. Their movement creates the sense of a society constantly watching, judging, needing, and demanding. When the staging swells, it is often because the ensemble has turned the stage into a living organism.
What I appreciated most is the nuance. This interpretation does not flatten its characters into icons. It gives them nerves. It gives them fear. It gives them bodies that tire, voices that fray, and choices that feel painfully human even when the story is already moving toward its end.
Jesus is not only a figure being watched. Judas is not only a betrayer. Mary Magdalene is not only a woman standing near the center of history. Around them, the crowd itself becomes a force: worshipful one moment, dangerous the next, desperate to believe in something until belief becomes another kind of pressure.
Why this Jesus Christ Superstar feels current
The modernity is not superficial. It is not current because it looks new. It feels current because it understands how quickly public adoration can become public consumption. It understands the loneliness of being projected upon. It understands how faith, politics, celebrity, and fear can occupy the same room.
That is why the story lands with such force. It does not feel like we are being brought back to another time. It feels like the time has caught up with us.
Vocally, the company is thrilling, but the more impressive achievement is how much humanity sits underneath the sound. The big moments have force, but the quieter ones matter just as much. There is intelligence in how the performers shape their lines, especially when they allow doubt and tenderness to sit beside spectacle. This is not a show interested only in vocal attack. It knows when to let a phrase ache.
Visually, the staging keeps returning to the body as a site of faith, pressure, spectacle, and sacrifice. The performers do not simply occupy the stage. They carve through it. They gather, scatter, climb, watch, and close in. The result is a world that feels ritualistic and contemporary, ancient in its story but modern in its urgency.
That balance is difficult. A production of Jesus Christ Superstar can easily become either too reverent or too detached. This one finds power in tension. It respects the material without embalming it. It lets the rock score move with heat and force, but it also trusts the silences, the glances, and the physical weight of people standing too close to a breaking point.
By the final stretch, the cross is no longer just an image waiting in the distance. It has been present from the beginning, in the light, in the sound, in the way bodies gather and turn. That is the strength of this staging. It does not treat the ending as a destination. It lets the ending haunt everything.
Final verdict: Jesus Christ Superstar at Solaire is urgent, muscular, and alive. It honors the rock opera’s legacy by refusing to let it stay frozen in the past. The show succeeds because it understands that spectacle is strongest when it has a pulse.
And this one has a pulse that goes straight to the heart.
For Manila audiences, this is a thrilling reminder of why Jesus Christ Superstar continues to endure. Not because the story is old, but because the questions inside it have never stopped being current. Who do we worship? Who do we betray? Who do we turn into symbols? And what happens when the person at the center of the crowd is also the loneliest person in the room?
Image rights: The hero image in this article, showing Joshua Bess and the Jesus Christ Superstar International Tour Company, was photographed by Vitt Salvador and provided by GMG Productions for editorial coverage of the Manila engagement. For image reuse, licensing, or permissions beyond this article, contact GMG Productions.