"Jesus Christ Superstar" is an enormously successful record album, called a "rock opera" in one of pop music's pathetic and pointless efforts to gain respectability by imitating orthodox forms. It is also an awful album, overproduced and overorchestrated in vain compensation for underinspiration and a complete lack of the qualities that make for rock music—vitality, rhythm, state of mind, musicality…. [It] required no imagination to envision as a commercially viable stage production….
[It] is, at its worst, a production that leaves you with a so-what feeling. For all its physical beauty, extravagance, enormity of orchestration and complexity of audio production, it provides no feeling—no sense of anything happening in a theatre. It is simply there, a superexpensive juke box playing the entire … score of the record album, note for note and lyric for miserable lyric. There is one brief musical addition, but otherwise, you could as well be listening to the record—if you could stand it all the way through.
Martin Gottfried, "'Jesus Christ Superstar' … Easter Show at the Music Hall," in Women's Wear Daily (copyright 1971, Fairchild Publications), October 14, 1971 (and reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, Vol. XXII, No. 15, October 11-18, 1971, p. 240).
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