Tim Rice: Last News

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In a very special Easter edition of the column, we’re revisiting the campy 1973 adaptation of the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar.The canon for “queer movies about Easter” isn’t exactly the most robust one. Because of its close and obvious link with Christianity and Catholicism (religions that obscure us at best and actively fight against us at worst), not many films depict the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection through an explicit queer lens—even if there are many works of religious film with heavy homoerotic subtext (see our previous column on Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, for example).However, this week we take a turn into queer-adjacent territory with the film adaptation of one of the most famous shows in musical theater history, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar.