Refiner’s Fire: A Bright Light Off-Broadway

Could Jesus be a hit?

What many Christians might have wished to see in Jesus Christ Superstar they can get in Rabboni. With a distinctively Jewish flavor, Rabboni (pronounced Ra-BONE-ee) is an off-Broadway musical that is both an artistic and an evangelistic endeavor. The show was originally a California community theater ministry, but its creator, Jeremiah Ginsberg—a converted Jew and former entertainment lawyer—felt God calling him to take it to New York.

Rabboni came close to opening on Broadway, but financial frustrations interfered. The play finally found sufficient backing to open at the Perry Street Theater in Greenwich Village last June.

Ginsberg’s deep commitment to the artistic integrity of his music convinces him that he would feel he had failed had he not staged the musical with the best actors and talent available (the cast is made up largely of non-Christians), so he took the necessary steps to “get it on the stage in the purest, most artistically successful form possible.”

He seems to have succeeded. New York Times reviewer Richard F. Shepard called the 15-member cast engaging, enthusiastic, and buoyant, and said Rabboni “makes its pitch entertainingly, with an ebullient joy.”

Jewish Flavor

Rabboni stresses the Jewish environment of early Christianity, so the gospel presentation has a familiar feel to the large number of Jewish people in the audience—estimated to be about half. The melodies, humor, dance, and dialect all combine artfully to capture the flavor and ethnicity of Jewish life. Jesus’ mother, for example, whines a little in order to elicit from him a compliment on her cooking. And the wedding at Cana is everything one would expect at a Jewish wedding—including a dispute with the caterer.

A show highlight is a picnic in Galilee. The audience is captivated by the songs “I Found a Bright Shining Morning Star” and “A New Covenant,” which feature Rendé Rae Norman (Miriam of Magdala) and Scott Elliot (James). The scene perhaps best portrays the relaxed joy that pervades the community of disciples as they share a meal with Jesus.

Contrasting sharply with that scene is the one that immediately follows, which focuses on Beelzebub and his demons in the netherworld. Portrayed, ironically, by one of the few Christians in the cast, Beelzebub sits above his demons and accepts the praise his threats have forced out of them. Jesus, on the other hand, sits on the ground in the midst of his disciples, whose praise clearly bubbles up from the heart.

Beelzebub is constantly plotting, calculating, commanding his forces—activity broken only by an occasional outburst of boastful rage. But the audience finds him comical. In one scene, decked out as a sleazy nightclub entertainer—complete with white dinner jacket cum red carnation and an unbuttoned shirt, exposing a hairy chest—Beelzebub belts out a number celebrating the future fall of Rome. There are few better modern personifications of Satan.

The author, however, does not allow the audience to laugh at Satan for long. Seeing him in another scene screaming his hatred at God, one is reminded of Satan’s basic insanity, his desire to control and rule at all costs. It was he who incited men to put Jesus to death, and it is he who now blinds those who do not see that Jesus is the Messiah.

Ginsberg has fought charges that he is a representative of Jews for Jesus, and an important financial contact backed away from the project at an early stage because of the protests of a Jewish business associate. However, the large number of Jews in the audience has generally applauded the production as excellent theater. Occasionally someone will storm out during the crucifixion scene—but one Conservative rabbi gave Ginsberg a hug “that almost broke [his] ribs” after seeing the performance.

Ginsberg reports Rabboni will open on Broadway December 17 in the Nederlander Theater, and he talks of expanding the cast and hiring additional musicians. Of course, all plans are dependent upon investors—and that is a tricky business when you plan to put Jesus on Broadway.

KRISTINE AND TERRY CHRISTLIEBKristine and Terry Christlieb live in Syracuse, New York, where he is a candidate for the Ph.D. in philosophy.

We received a record in the mail the other day. That is not unusual at a magazine, but this record came with a bright red sticker on the jacket announcing: “The original Russian version recorded secretly in the USSR.”

The album, titled The Trumpet Call, is by Soviet rock musician Valeri Barinov and his band. Barinov composed the music to witness to Soviet youth, and for this crime he is now imprisoned somewhere in the Soviet Union. His testimony and the story of the persecution that began when he sought official recognition for the group (also called Trumpet Call), which led finally to his trial and sentencing, have been chronicled in CT News since 1983 when a tape of his rock opera was smuggled to the West.

The Trumpet Call owes its life, in part, to Jesus Christ Superstar: Barinov says the Lord used it to reproach him. It was, he says, as if God were saying, “What about you believers? You meet in church, you sing hymns and psalms and you preach, but … who will save the sinners?… Nonbelievers compose such an opera, but what are you doing?”

Barinov worked on his opera for six years, then produced the recording with the help of Christian professional musicians—who had to manage to get off work at the same time in order to rehearse and record in secret. It took them an additional year to complete the work.

According to Lorna Bourdeaux of Keston College, the English-based organization that studies religious affairs in Eastern-bloc countries, Barinov sent the tape to the West in order to have the music broadcast back to the Soviet Union over foreign radio stations. “He hoped that in this way the message … a call to repentance and belief in Jesus Christ and in his death and resurrection, would reach thousands who avidly listen to foreign radio broadcasts” (CT, Aug. 5, 1983, p. 43).

No Muted Sound

There is an urgency in the driving music of The Trumpet Call, an urgency that is missing from much Christian rock in the West. While the heavily synthesized style sounds more like rock of the seventies than the eighties, it is extremely listenable—even in Russian—and it obviously communicates. Though the Russian lyrics will be unintelligible to most American ears, they are clear and likely to be understood easily by those who do know the language.

How many musicians who perform Christian music in the West would be as willing to sacrifice their lives to communicate the gospel in song? Have our culture’s concerns with gate guarantees, recording contracts, agents, radio plays, and sophisticated equipment become more important than the gift God has entrusted to us?

The Trumpet Call was remixed in the U.S., and it is being marketed by I Care, an organization committed to using Christian music to help spread the gospel in countries whose governments restrict or limit its use. (If the album is not available locally, contact I Care at P.O. Box 1111, Franklin, Tenn. 37064.)

The record liner declares the album to be the fulfillment of Barinov’s vision to “share the Good News of Jesus Christ with millions of Soviet young people who ordinarily would never hear the gospel.” Funds from its sale go to support efforts to free Barinov and Sergei Timokhin, a member of Trumpet Call who has also been imprisoned, and to alleviate the plight of persecuted Christians behind the Iron Curtain.

CAROL R. THIESSEN

The Poetry of John Leax

In his foreword to John Leax’s recently published book of poetry (his first since 1974), fellow Houghton College professor Lionel Basney calls the spirit of Leax’s poems “so close to the flesh that you may have the sense that the two are changing places.… Leax’s work, like all good poetry, is a source of hope for poetry itself; and also for Christian culture.”

Following are some examples, from The Task of Adam (Markham Books, Zondervan; 1985):

The End of Labor

The end of labor will come

with the end of everything,

the earth spent,

a cinder circling

in the icy dark.

What good then

the daily order I make

laboring against

the decline of light?

And what good

the scribing of these poems,

local words

announcing faith

in worlds to come?

After the end,

what hope,

what renewal?

The end of labor.

Staying Put

Vanity dies hard.

When the letter, official and inviting,

asked me to drop all,

cross purposes and miles,

to take up another’s task,

I wanted to go.

But I have imagined

a here not present

except by my labor.

I am bound to friends,

to four apple trees,

a row of blueberries,

and a dream

of asparagus waving

in the wind.

I choose to stay.

Moments, part 6

No whitehaired Presbyterian

preaching Christ crucified

will scare me into blessing death.

I want to see

color invade

that chalky shell

that was his body

and see him swing

a hammer once again.

I want to see

in each set nail

God’s proof

that order is restored.

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