This is my last Andrew Lloyd Webber post, I promise, but I really buried the lede on Monday, because whilst enjoying Lyndsay Ellis' "Gethsemane" mashup, what I really should have been sharing was Ted Neeley's extraordinary 2006 Farewell Tour performance in its entirety, which it only occured to me to watch last night, and which is above. Neeley played Jesus in the film back in 1973, a Golden-Turkey-Award-nominated onscreen performance so shockingly uncommitted that I'd assumed someone else had provided the singing and Neeley was just a boss-eyed model hired to look confused and mouth along, no offense meant to boss-eyed models.
But my goodness, the sixty-three year-old Ted had me throwing my hand control across the room with excitement. I literally can't stay seated watching it. And if the reactions of his cast-mates in the wings when Neeley hits that high "WHY" seem a little over the top, the full documentary explains that this was actually the first time he'd sung "Gethsemane" since the memorial service of his original Judas, Carl Anderson, meaning he hadn't once sung it in rehearsals, not even in the technical rehearsals, and so this was the first time they were hearing it, and indeed the first time since the death of Anderson that Ted Neeley was hearing it. Here he is again, singing it again ten years later in Rotterdam, still raging against the dying of the light as a seventy-three-year-old Jesus. Importance may be empirical, but things mattering is subjective, and I find how much this matters to all involved incredibly inspiring, even in the face of Tim Rice's reliably shit lyrics... Look, that nobody would say "a new, exciting point of view" rather than "an exciting new point of view" is a hill I'm happy to die on. And speaking of dying on hills, here's today's Defoe:
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