The Godspell Experience: Inside a Transformative Musical

by Carol de Giere

As childlike clown characters played with Biblical parables, they would, in Gordon's words, "rediscover this person, Jesus, through the innocent, unprejudiced prism of a child."

You have to have your heart on your sleeve when you come to see Godspell in order to receive the full experience that it has to offer."

The show nourished its audiences because, while it was fun, it wasn't actually frivolous. Tebelak had conceived a multi-layered theatrical happening that allowed audiences to be entertained with comedic performances while they savored subtle meanings in the underlying story of community and compassion.

Godspell was an antidote for the times. "Don't forget, it was during the Vietnam War. I think people needed that kind of message. There was something about the good news of that message that suddenly you would find nuns and priests in the audience and they're saying, 'I can look at Jesus the man and I can rediscover the joy of this message. He didn't mean for us to sit around and mope.'"

this new musical couldn't have emerged in isolation without the life adventures that came before it.

The youthful spirit of questioning assumptions of elders touched Schwartz, Tebelak, and others who would be involved in Godspell, and helped them take a fresh approach to a new musical with centuries-old religious content.

Brook advised them against preparing all blocking and details in advance of rehearsals, but rather to let things evolve more fluidly.

"Afterward, I became pretty excited because I found what I wanted to portray on stage… Joy!"

wanted to make it the simple, joyful message that I felt the first time I read them and re-create the sense of community, which I did not share when I went to that service."

while in previous generations, Jesus has been viewed as a teacher, judge, or healer, today these images have lost their power. What can most touch "our jaded modern consciousness" is the clown character—a promoter of joy.

For Tebelak, associating Biblical material with clowns didn't mean he was making fun of religion. Rather, he wanted his project to be an antidote to lifeless and boring spiritual experiences; clownlike performances were a means to an end.

I was so touched by it; the whole idea of making people laugh before you make them cry made a big impression on me.

interesting: The Godspell would open with the antithesis of a harmonious community as a contrast for what was later created by Jesus and the disciples—a transformation that could be theatrically compelling.

John-Michael felt that the way to buck the authorities was to make fun of them. That's what a lot of Godspell was about at the beginning: challenging authority in a clownish way."

They didn't take me down with respect. They took me down like children would take a body down. So they had me under each arm, under each leg while they were singing 'Prepare Ye.' It was more like a body carried out of the battlefield in Vietnam. It had a very different imagery to it.

"He couldn't find any relevance to his life based on church dogma. He wanted to strip all that away. He said, 'Let's find out who this Jesus might have been.'" His plan was to re-approach the Biblical parables and texts with the innocence of a child, and to play with the material as if it was a school recess. The rehearsal process wouldn't focus on integrating the funniest pop cultural references the group could find, but would be about discovering the meaning of the stories through play, through improvisation. The best moments would become the musical.

"It was about being sensitive to what was going on around you on stage, having the trust in the other performer, and the courage to go where that performer would go."

Tebelak asked them to consider what their personal experience would be if they met Jesus. He'd say, "If this kind of person came into your life for a period of a day, this kind of perfect soul, what kind of person would you become?"

In the routine, whenever one of the Stooges said "Niagara Falls," another would say, "Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…" and attack the person saying the trigger phrase. For Godspell, at one point David Haskel (John/Judas) reacted to something Nathan (Jesus) said with "Jesus Chr…." Nathan led the others with "Slowly I turned, step by step…" and pretended they were about to attack Haskell.

"Steve Nathan led us aggressively all over the rehearsal space at Great Jones Street," recalls Peggy Gordon. "Whatever he did, we did. When he crawled, we did; when he jumped up, so did we. He did this for what felt like twenty minutes, gradually

increasing the speed so that we would increase our responsiveness to follow whatever and wherever he took us. When we were practically in a fever pitch of responsiveness, he said the line [from Matthew 6:22], 'The lamp of the body is the eye.' We'd been in such a responsive frenzy that we just automatically echoed what he said. It was so powerful. We organically echoed every single line: 'The lamp, lamp, lamp of the body, body, body, is the eye, eye, eye….' John- Michael loved it and had us keep it."

He wanted to take Jesus down off the cross and exemplify the joy of the Gospels, the life. Many religions are so concentrated on the death aspect. [Wanting to emphasize Jesus' life] was one of his major motivations for writing."

Don’t play the ending of the play - play the life as it is happening.

"My first impression of the show was that it was messy but inspired." —Stephen Schwartz

Schwartz and Tebelak evaluated the "event" of each song, so that the actors wouldn't just be stopping the story to sing. In most instances, songs suggested characters' moments of revelation or conversion or commitment. "They are pledging their loyalty, their belief, their faith to become a member of this community that's being formed," Schwartz explains. Accordingly, he wrote specific songs for a featured cast member to lead.

I laughed through the whole first act and then I saw the second act as it gradually transformed into a completely different kind of tone. And by the time that run-through was over I was in tears. I realized, I don't know what's going to happen to this thing, but it's a momentous show."

Whenever directors guided actors in Godspell, they were concerned with how effectively the show communicated to an audience. Faso notes, "We felt really strongly that we wanted to be able to develop an acting style that could be understood by anyone. We always told the actors, with this kind of acting you have to make the story clear to everyone in the audience. Imagine you have an audience of children, and half of them are deaf, half of them are blind. You tell the story using every part of your body and psyche." This encouraged the group to focus on physical movements to express the story, as well as to try out interesting voices and sounds for anyone who was listening but couldn't see.

Katie Hanley appreciated the "privilege of being able to do our own improvisations," and learning that clowning was about joy coming from within.

"I explained to a Jewish fan who said she thought the show was preaching Christianity: that wasn't our purpose at all… Our purpose was to celebrate the essential message of the unconditional love taught by this one clown, to love thy neighbor as thyself. As Steve Nathan always said, 'Our hope is that we could make the world just a little bit better.'"

What can go wrong with Godspell? For one thing, it can be thrown off by an overly showy clown. "The important thing to remember is Godspell as the show is the star," Herb Braha reminds us. He cautions against performances that draw attention to themselves and away from the whole.

The show has an emotional range that is not always honored, and a need for honesty as well as delight. It can be less fulfilling for audiences if it's too jokey, too political, set in too strange an environment, not understood by the cast, or not felt authentically.

According to Stephen Schwartz, at its core the show is about community—about having a group of people bond emotionally and feel transformed by the experience.

In Schwartz's words, "a group of disparate people slowly become a community built around one charismatic individual (Jesus), who then leaves them and they have to carry on as a community without him." He then warns, "If this basic dramatic arc is not achieved, Godspell does not exist; no matter how amusing and tuneful individual moments may be, the production has failed."

"For Jesus," Nathan continues, "there was an ultimate price to pay, which was the story, but his job in Godspell wasn't to be sweet; it wasn't to preach. It was to wake up the cast. It was to show them what was really there."

So Godspell's creators didn't view clowns as passive jokers, but as individuals standing apart from others, actively promoting transformation or truth revelation.

Salazar says that being a clown required stepping out of his own comfort zone. "I wasn't afraid to poke fun at myself. That's crucial for a clown. You've got to be able to first, know the show really well, and then second, to put yourself on display in a fun way where the audience can laugh with you."

"With Godspell I thought of Jesus as the greatest prankster of them all, of the most infectious fun meister. What a wonderful way to think of Jesus, because religion had always showed him as a very serious man with a very serious mission who gets terribly persecuted and murdered. And Godspell opened my eyes. This is funny. All my life I've been worshipping a tragic story. What about giving people another version of that story?!"

With each setting, the clowns are transformed into characters that suit the environment. Stephen Schwartz comments, "What I think is important, as I say in the Note to the Director in the script, is that these eight strangers are looking for answers to their lives and become increasingly hostile to each other's ideas and points of view, until John/Judas arrives and announces the coming of someone who will show them another way ('Prepare Ye')."

"It is easy for the show to appear formless, or worse—for the ten performers to degenerate into ten stand-up comics vying with one another for laughs and attention," Stephen Schwartz remarks. "This is the diametric opposite of what Godspell is all about."

On the most basic level, the show holds together through Jesus' expanding role as a wise guide.

Each character's journey followed its own arc, contributing a spirit of growth to the total drama. The outer actions of spending time with a wise teacher resulted in inner transformation over time. Their personal growth wasn't something the characters spoke about specifically, but it was demonstrated through their interactions, their growing ease, and their change of spirit.

Tebelak not only wanted audiences to witness the setup of a teacher-student relationship, he also wanted them to note the results: the Jesus clown's spiritual classroom supported the other clowns' personal development.

As part of the process, each of the actors on stage has an "aha!" moment during which he or she effectively signs in to the community with Jesus. Most of the clowns had songs in Act I, and it was during their scene with their song that they really connected. (Robin: "Day by Day," Gilmer: "Learn Your Lessons Well," Joanne: "Bless the Lord," David: "All for the Best," Lamar: "All Good Gifts," Herb: "Light of the World") The remaining three clowns who had songs in Act II found their moments during Act I scenes, according to Peggy Gordon.

This meant that by the end of Act I, all nine clowns were unified in their understanding of the group purpose and the significance of their leader, the first clown. The process of creating this sharing community, evolving as it does over time, provides an overarching theme for Godspell that unifies the disparate elements.

they described Godspell as the story of a group of people who, at the beginning of the show, can't communicate, as if they are speaking different languages. (For those of you who know the show well, that's the 'Babel' sequence.) And then, through the course of the show and thanks to the leadership of one individual, they learn how to talk to one another and how to get along . . . regardless of religion, race, or political party affiliation. And by learning what is really important, they learn how to live each day by day together in harmony (literally!)."

Schwartz notes that community-creating is not just an act that's put on for an audience, but it also emerges through the process of preparing the show. Thus, in addition to the story of clowns growing closer to Jesus and each other, the acting troupe members are working cooperatively together, so that they are, in a sense, walking the talk.

John/Judas is the only character with essentially the opposite arc of the other clowns. Rather than being an individual who gradually grasps Jesus' greatness and commits to the loving community he is creating, John/Judas connects emotionally to Jesus immediately at the Baptism, then questions Jesus' teaching mid show, and ends up isolated.

In Godspell, Judas doesn't betray Jesus with a kiss, but rather Jesus kisses him. It still works as the infamous betrayal moment when Jesus is identified, but it means that even under pressure, Jesus doesn't change his philosophy—he even forgives Judas.

Later, during "On the Willows," they returned the items to the trunk with the attitude that they had formed new identities based on what they had learned from Jesus, and the outer trappings were no longer needed.

In Tebelak's conception of the show, the makeup isn't removed at the end of the show, but rather just before the Last Supper. The moment initiates the next phase of the show. Scardino says it signaled "a time to have no illusions—to be naked in the world again and accept what's about to happen."

Contrary to accusations from Godspell's detractors, Tebelak was not making a theological statement with his artistic choices. For his purposes, it was sufficient to show Jesus in action as a catalyst for personal transformation and as a model of love and compassion.