Resurrected ‘Godspell’ would foster community on campus

If there’s one thing Columbia’s campus lacks, it’s a sense of community. And the best fix for that is a healthy dose of theater—maybe that love-thy-neighbor Jesus musical by Stephen Schwartz would do the trick.

“Godspell” can be a sickly sweet church romp, an interesting take on the Book of Matthew, a beautiful portrait of the hopes and beliefs of millions and, at the very least, a collection of soulful folk songs set to a age-old story. Making its Broadway debut in 1971, “Godspell” appealed to all kinds of people, religious or non-religious.

Due to its progressive, liberal-agenda approach to a religious subject (The show is loosely drawn from the Book of Matthew and the words from a few hymns), it was banned from many conservative churches across America and found a perpetual home on the high-school theater circuit. Talks of a Broadway revival were recently halted indefinitely due to the recession.

The story goes like this. In a squalid urban space someplace behind a building in Manhattan, Jesus calls out to God wondering when he’ll save the people. His followers arrive and learn from him the joy of love, realizing their ability to build a “beautiful city.” The second act brings Jesus’ death and curtain-call resurrection in the show’s finale, taking us from excitement to foreboding to mourning to joy.

After co-directing a version of “Godspell” (me, a gay Jew) for a large rural church, I became fully aware of how exasperating this musical can be. Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak˜ created a show so full of childish clowning and puns that it sometimes verges on schizophrenia. One begins to wonder if the characters are not escapees from a mental ward, or Kool-Aid drinkers from a brainwashing cult.

But if liberties are taken with some of the beautiful songs, and the core philosophy of the writers is taken seriously—that is, if we remember that this show is about childlike hope and community, about people shedding the restraints of cold, rational New York to love each other—it can be a transformative experience.

“Godspell” can be very powerful, but as Schwartz says in his introduction to the play, it is also deceptively hard to direct. It can easily turn into an unconscious high school theater nightmare. But given the right group of people, in the right space—cough, cough Columbia—”Godspell” will hopefully take us back to a time when ambition and individualism were unheard of—at least until the curtain falls.