Jesus Christ Superstar

It started life as what was known as a concept album in 1970, a rock opera with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, the pair’s first full-blown, bona fide hit following their debut operetta, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

The musical is sung-through, with no spoken dialogue, the story loosely based on the accounts in the Gospels of the last week of Jesus’s life, from the preparation for his arrival with his disciples in Jerusalem to his crucifixion. The scenes exploring the political and personal struggles between Judas Iscariot and Jesus have been added by Lloyd Webber and Rice.

It would be hard to imagine a better setting for this deeply felt revival than the Open Air Theatre at Regent’s Park on a balmy summer evening.

The stage is dominated by a prone wooden cross set between a couple of sturdy two-storey constructions made from metal girders which accommodate a lot of the action on the lower level and the band on the upper tier.

Declan Bennett, late of the Irish stage musical, Once, and a sometime inhabitant of EastEnders (before Ronnie Mitchell had him dispatched) is cool as Christ – in both definitions of the word.

Yes, he is hip in his baseball cap, but he seems almost irritated by his followers, weighed down perhaps by the tsunami of fame that is engulfing him.

As the man who betrays him, Tyrone Huntley’s Judas gives the most arresting performance of the evening, his voice apparently able to tackle anything asked of it. Anoushka Lucas as Mary Magdalene makes her mark, too, but then she has arguably the best song of the night in I Don’t Know How To Love Him, which she sings with touching clarity. I also liked David Thaxton’s Pilate.

As darkness falls, we move inexorably towards Jesus’s bloody end. This may sound odd in the circumstances, but I found it a little overwrought – a lot of people in white clothes chucking themselves around the stage amid swirling mist. And I can’t for the life of me see what director Timothy Sheader was trying to convey by having the baying crowd throw golden glitter at Christ’s beaten body.

In short, less for me would have been more. That said, it’s a vivid realisation of a timeless story that had the audience on its feet at the end.

All these years later, it’s difficult to recall why the original production was picketed by outraged nuns. The times they are a’changin’. But for the better?

Until 27 August at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London NW1: 0844-826 4242, www.openairtheatre.com