“Alexander Superstar.”
Quick quiz time: This hugely successful sung-through musical details the life and death of a historic person while utilizing a genre of music that had not previously seen such massive achievement in musical theater. A landmark on and off Broadway, it is opened by the man who will eventually kill the title character, features real historical events, a flamboyant king, inter-personal politics, and a painful love. What musical is it? If you read the title of this article, you already know the answer. It’s both of them.
I like musicals, though I never considered myself much of a theater kid. I did some acting in high school, and I’ve seen a handful of shows, but I never made it as huge a part of my life as some people have. But I appreciate theater for what it is, and I’m always happy to see something literary reach the ultimate heights of pop-culture stardom and have memes made about it.
But even though my experience with theater is limited, I love Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. I saw it when it came to Chicago a few winters ago, and I was blown away by the music, the writing, the characters, the acting, everything. The songs are expressive, emotional, and meaningful, and the story arc itself is something akin to a tragedy that Shakespeare might have written. Once I saw the musical, it was no small wonder that it had reached the popularity that it did. Hell, even Weird Al Yankovic got in on the action.
But as much as I loved it, I couldn’t help but sense that I’d seen it somewhere before. And then I remembered Jesus Christ Superstar, the seminal 1970’s rock opera by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it all made sense.
I’m not particularly religious, but Jesus Christ Superstar has been a favorite of mine for a long time. To a certain extent, I grew up singing songs from that show without even realizing it. For a long time my favorite song from any musical ever was the one where Alice Cooper berates Jesus and calls him a phony. I listen to some songs from that show when I work out, same as with Hamilton. So when I saw Hamilton and started getting some JC Superstar vibes, I connected the dots and tried to figure out where, exactly, I was seeing the connections. And once I got it all figured out, it made perfect, eerie sense.
If this were a research paper, my thesis would be this: Hamilton is the Jesus Christ Superstar of the 2010’s. And it isn’t just because each was critically and financially successful and became a touchstone for musical theater in their own right. Their equal success, however, with Hamilton probably surpassing JC Superstar in popularity, is only the most outward of their similarities. The shows themselves share quite a few characteristics, and it begins right at the premise of each show.
So, just as a refresher, Jesus Christ Superstar tells the story of the last week of Jesus’s life prior to his crucifixion. It mainly features Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene, as well as Pontius Pilate and various priests that conspired against Jesus. A lot of you probably already know the gist of it. If you’re Christian and you don’t know the story, you might want to have a long think about your religion. But the overall arc is this; Jesus enters Jerusalem and his popularity makes him an enemy of the powers that be. His followers love him, Judas betrays him, and the Romans kill him. And on the third day, he rose again, in fulfillment of the scriptures. That’s how the gospels go.
The musical itself follows that same outline, more or less. Judas takes a more central role, with the musical displaying more of the struggles between Jesus and Judas as well as Mary Magdalene’s feelings for Jesus. It isn’t exactly the gospels to a T, as the musical doesn’t even have the resurrection, but it’s pretty close.
Hamilton, on the other hand, follows Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It sees his rise from poverty to political stardom and all the people he met along the way. It follows him as he works with George Washington to win the American Revolutionary War, defends the Constitution of the fledgling nation, and eventually falls from grace at his own hands. The show itself is pretty historically accurate, minus skin tone, and I don’t have the time to go into the huge impact that Hamilton’s legacy has on American history. But just know that Hamilton was a pretty big deal, m’kay?
So. We’ve got two shows, ostensibly very different. One’s about Jesus, one’s about a guy in a powdered wig. One’s set to rock’n’roll, and the other’s set to hip-hop and rap. What makes them so similar? Think of it this way; the very premise is pretty much the same for both shows, on a generalized level. Each show is a historical drama following an influential leader who still has bearings on our lives today. They aim to explore the more human aspects of each of those figures’ lives, often told through the voices of those around them. And they’re sung-through, with little-to-no spoken dialogue. Not only that, they were both musically revolutionary.
While perhaps the idea of classic rock in musical theater is normal now, it wasn’t always so. Rock operas, and the use of that style of music, only date to around the mid-60’s, and Jesus Christ Superstar was perhaps the first rock opera to normalize it in theater. There had been some rock operas prior to JC Superstar, but JC Superstar was the first to make it work and make money at it, too. It received rave reviews, worldwide tours, and even two movies. It proved to people that rock could exist in musical theater, that songs didn’t just have to be Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain. And Hamilton did the same thing, by proving that huge shows didn’t just have to be Jesus Christ Superstar.
Before Hamilton came along in 2015 and 2016, there weren’t a lot of musicals using hip-hop or rap. There were a few that were pretty well received, one of them also written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, but none had reached the same level of critical success as, say, Wicked. Everyone’s heard of Wicked, even non-theater people But how many people have heard of In the Heights? Hamilton changed that. Hamilton, much like JC Superstar, made it okay to have rap in mainstream musicals. It wasn’t just a niche, experimental thing anymore. It could work, and it could be just as good as any traditional musical.
Hamilton and JC Superstar both invigorated the musical theater scene with a much-needed shot of new directions to explore. You could say that JC Superstar and the concept album it spawned from partially paved the way for things like American Idiot or even The Wall, not to mention plenty of musicals like Rent or Rocky Horror Picture Show of all things. And I’m entirely sure that Hamilton will have the same effect. In a few decades, I believe that people will look back on the many unique, successful rap musicals (Rapsicals? Rapsodies?) and point to Hamilton as part of the inspiration. Hamilton, like JC Superstar, opened the gates.
But, like I said earlier, the similarities don’t stop there. One of the most striking comparisons that I found is that both musicals are opened not by the title character, but by the man who will eventually kill said title character. JC Superstar opens with Judas Iscariot singing “Heaven on their Minds,” and the first verse of “Alexander Hamilton” is sung by Aaron Burr, who goes on to kill Hamilton in a duel. Spoiler, I guess? I don’t know if I should have warned you about that earlier, but Jesus dies, too.
Not only that, the men who sing these songs, Judas and Aaron Burr, are portrayed pretty similarly. They’re both moderate men who would rather take a cautious step forward as opposed to a full-on leap. Judas outright says that it would have been safer for everyone if Jesus stayed in Nazareth, and Aaron Burr explain several times how he doesn’t like taking risks, especially in “Wait for It.” Both become intricately connected to the title character and deeply regret the part they played in the title character’s eventual death.
I suppose you could draw connections between the portrayal of Alexander Hamilton and Jesus, too, but that’s a whole can of worms I don’t really want to open. I will say that they’re both ambitious leaders who seek to make a new world of prosperity and peace for their people. JC Superstar’s depiction of Jesus is interesting, though, because it seems almost to portray him as human and flawed, but I don’t want to get into the theological ramifications of that. But Hamilton fully embraces the humanness of Alexander Hamilton, flaws and all. He is not a perfect man.
Beyond that, you’ve got the romantic interest characters, like Mary Magdalene and Eliza/Angelica Schuyler, though I think the main connection here is between Mary and Eliza. Both are deeply in love with their respective men, despite the fact that both hurt them deeply, in one way or another. Their loves and respects are tangled and confusing and don’t leave anybody feeling better by the end of the shows, but they both feel very real and human. And then you’ve even got Angelica Schuyler, who, like Mary Magdalene, isn’t allowed to love Hamilton/Jesus, but does anyway.
My personal favorite connection between the two shows comes in with the flamboyant, arrogant, gaudily-clad kings. JC Superstar sees King Herod sing his over-the-top kick-line song about how he sees Jesus as nothing more than a fool and pest, someone who isn’t even worth the trouble of executing. It’s loud, it’s energetic, it’s glamorous, and it’s downright vicious. And in Hamilton we get the same thing with King George’s three songs. They’re all condescending, all done in a traditional Broadway style, and all revel in the presumed destruction of the American colonists.
Then there’s other little things, too, like how both musicals are obsessed with the concepts of historical memory and who remembers you after you’re dead. Pontius Pilate, Judas, and Aaron Burr all comment how they’re doomed to be remembered as men who killed a great leader. And there’s other little things, too, like songs that discuss the true nature of power, influence, and what it means to be a good leader. Songs like “Hosanna,” “Simon Zealotes,” and “The Room where it Happens.”
And of course there’s the recurring themes of what’s too much and how much you’d give for your goals. We’ve got songs like “Non-stop” and “That would be Enough” from Hamilton, and “Damned for All Time” and “Superstar” from JC Superstar. I could also talk about how Hamilton is so racially conscious. Some people have said that JC Superstar is, too, but not nearly to the same level as Hamilton. Making Judas black in most of the productions doesn’t really count as racially conscious, if you ask me, so that’s one difference, at least. Hamilton does a much better job at diversity.
And, for that matter, Hamilton does a better job at historical accuracy, too. But, overall, both plays are pretty comparable, from premise to themes to characters and even sometimes down to the songs themselves. That was why I felt like Hamilton was so familiar when I watched it, I think. Because I saw a similar shape of a skeleton underneath the minuteman outfits and powdered wigs. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Did Lin-Manuel Miranda intend for any of these similarities? Probably not. I don’t think he had JC Superstar in mind when he wrote Hamilton, but I could be wrong. I just think it’s interesting that two of the best, most popular musicals of recent memory should have so much in common, even accidentally. Maybe it’s just a good formula. We like tragedies and we like human emotions. Both shows have these traits in spades, and both have stellar music to go with it. And I love them both and will argue with anybody who says either isn’t a masterpiece of theater.
But only one has Peggy, so in the end it doesn’t really matter, anyway. We know which one wins out.
