Lyricist Tim Rice has found for ["Jesus Christ Superstar"] a personal, and I think persuasive, tone of voice. The tone of voice is not merely mod or pop or jauntily idiomatic in an opportunistic way. It sheathes an attitude. It speaks, over and over again, of the inadequate, though forgivable, responses ordinary men always do make when confronted by mystery….

[Rice's] are blunt, rude, pointedly unlyrical lyrics, not meant to coat any period with a little literary flavoring but to catch hold of thought processes—venal, obtuse, human. Delivered in the jargon we more or less live by, they become woefully and ironically recognizable.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's score functions well, too, using rock as a frame rather than an obsession. The beat and blare establish an angle of hearing, telling us to cock our ears for the jumpy directness of the lyrics. Inside the frame, though, are going to appear the genuine sweetness of Mary Magdalene's "Everything's All Right," the ragtime insult of Herod's clog-dance about his captive, the college-bowl exultation of "Hosanna, Heysanna" for Palm Sunday—that is to say, all, or nearly all, of the convenient sounds people reach for when they want to sorrow or celebrate. The music is unselfconscious in its borrowings from the melodious and the commonplace; it wants to say that the world was commonplace then, as it is now, in the presence of what it could not, cannot, fathom. If it is young work, and work for the young, it has the consistency of innocence, of stumbling upon familiar things with surprise and reacting instantly in slang. "Jesus Christ Superstar" is a pop opera about pop attitudes, and I think it works. (p. 1)