Godawful

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GODSPELL

Directed by DAVID GREENE

Screenplay by DAVID GREENE and JOHN-MICHAEL TEBELAK

Godspell is a little time capsule of a movie. Some day archaeologists will dig it up and reconstruct from this all-singing, all-dancing version of the Gospel according to Consciousness III much of what was shoddy about American culture (cinema subdivision) in the last half of the 20th century.

Responding to mysterious sci-fi bleepings, a group of flower children led by David Haskell come together for a splash party in Central Park's Belvedere Fountain. There they find Christ: an androgyne wearing a Superman sweatshirt. Repairing to a junkyard, which handles only clean and cute junk, they outfit themselves as a band of strolling players devoted to acting out the Passion against the picturesque backdrop of the modern Jerusalem (Manhattan!). The players hop, skip and bounce relentlessly through their routines as if the relevant saint for them was St. Vitus. Not that any of these rolling pebbles bring any passion to the Passion, since what they want to elicit from the audience is a series of ahs rather than a sense of awe. Nor that New York, in Director David Greene's vision, looks like a city in need of salvation--which it surely is.

Indeed, the need being so obvious and the city's tawdriness such a familiar symbol of the nation's urban mess, each Saran-wrapped view of it is likely to jar audiences with a shock of nonrecognition. Where has Greene hidden the psychologically bombed civilian population? Where have all the smog, graffiti and litter gone?

Still, the blame for turning the viewer's idle mind into a devil's workshop of speculation is not entirely Greene's. The author of the original hit play, John-Michael Tebelak, collaborated with him on a screenplay that finds no equivalent in hippie jargon for the exalted language of the Bible. Instead it offers, among other conceits, the Lazarus legend climaxed with a pie in the face. Stephen Schwartz's score is perfectly suited to this level of imitation rock. "God save the people . . ./ Save the people from despair," one of Schwartz's lyrics moans. A good beginning would have been to spare them Godspell, which adores him far less than it does its own adorableness.

--Richard Schickel

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