In my Freshman year of high school, I was able to see “Jesus Christ Superstar” in Chicago- the first traveling Broadway show. It was at the Auditorium Theater, and we had box seats looking down at the stage. Still have my program from 1972. It was an unbelievable musical. I listen to it on CD every Easter weekend.
In my Senior year of High School, I was able to visit Oberammergau in Germany, where the Passion Play has been shown since 1634. It plays every ten years, but had a special showing on the 300th year. The book “the Passion Play of Oberammergau”, 1934, tells the history, and has the play.
The third book “The American Passion Play” 1970, signed by the author, is a study of the play in Bloomington, IL, the longest continually running Passion Play in America (since 1924). It also has a history of other towns in America and their Passion Plays, notably Zion.
According to this history, Zion’s play began 1935. Third year in, after first show, a fire burned down the Tabernacle. They then played three shows at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, and built a new auditorium. In 1959, after only one performance, the Auditorium burnt. (side note, My Grandmother remembered this-seeing the smoke through window, while at the dentist downtown. Her house was across the corner from the Auditorium. The city stored all of the stuff they could save from flames, in the four stall garage building of my great-grandparents home, next door.) An outdoor theater was then to be built, but the play was taken to Waukegan West Auditorium from 1961 to 1968.
In 1969, Zion finished an outdoor amphitheater that housed the Passion Play for eight or ten years. This is the place I remember watching the play in my youth.
“I dreamed I met a Galilean, a most amazing man. He had that look you very rarely find, the haunting, hunted kind. I asked him to say what had happened, how it all began. I asked again, he never said a word, as if he hadn’t heard. And next, the room was full of wild and angry men, they seemed to hate this man. They fell on him and then disappeared again. Then I saw thousands of millions crying for this man, and then I heard them mentioning my name, and leaving me the blame.” Pontius Pilate from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Happy Easter
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