The Passion (2016) Online

I saw this production last night with the preconception that I was going to hate it (After all, I don't really like musicals). In fact, I presented it to my wife earlier in the day simply to make fun of it. A modern adaptation of the Gospels? How would that even work? And how could it not be ridiculous? However, the more I watched it the more I realized that it was actually pretty good.

I would not say that every performance was perfect, but I would say that they were all very good. Jencarlos and Daughtry were incredibly moving in every one of their performances. Seal was also fantastic.

The music they chose, especially for Jencarlos and Daughtry, was perfect. The lyrics were incredible in light of the scenes they were performing.

My only complaint is simply a matter of preference. I felt that the woman playing Mary was hard to relate to. She was a great singer, but I felt that her music choices were weak and that she simply did not look the part. However, nothing was technically wrong. She just isn't who I would have chosen for the role.

As you can probably tell, I do not review movies very often. I normally would like to spend more time writing something before I release it for public view, but I felt that it was important to get this out there as soon as possible. There are only two written reviews for this production. One loved it, one hated it. I am hoping that someone who felt the same way that I did would give the show a chance. I think you will like it.

This was so different than I expected! It was more like being in church :) This rendition of the final days of Jesus's ministry was very biblical in all of the words spoken. The songs were excellent and I got chills watching the ending of this modern adaptation. It WAS just that, an adaptation, not the full story so all have to keep this in mind. Anyway, giving it a 9 as I could have used more acting instead of the procession conversations although the interviews were great. Loved seeing Yolanda and Michael W. in this also as they are oldies but goodies! Daughtry, Seal and Trisha AND Jencarlos all did an excellent job!

Possible spoilers if you don't know the story.

I will describe and evaluate this production the way that I saw it, because you who are reading this might see it the same way. This was more than just a musical with songs and dialogue. We also saw progress reports on the movement of a giant lighted cross through the normally sinful streets of New Orleans, with many people following (some with palm branches) and interviews with ordinary people.

I hope you get to see the interviews. Especially the one with the veteran. Other people told stories of faith.

Mostly, this production involved Tyler Perry talking to a large live audience, with singers, musicians and an energetic, joyful choir on the main stage, with most of the action taking place elsewhere and viewed on screens at the main stage. Perry did a great job and showed he had faith but was also flawed like most of us.

There's not much point in my commenting on the music, though I will say everyone involved with the music seemed talented. I consider only the organ or the piano acceptable in church, and maybe the guitar under very limited circumstances, and none of those involve anything resembling rock music. I don't consider pounding drums to be music unless they belong to Buddy Rich or Gene Krupa, or are in a marching band, or are called tympani and used in a symphony orchestra. It took me a while to realize that some of the songs were familiar and I had actually heard them. Occasionally, a song would be soft enough to almost meet my standards, and many of those were performed by Trisha Yearwood as Mary, wearing a 21st century dress. That's not to say I liked everything she did, but that's not important. The live audience loved the music, and those of us watching TV saw plenty of close-ups of individuals in the audience. Yes, there were tears at times.

The first dialogue from actors took place in a bar. Jesus spoke to his disciples there. I have never seen a Jesus like this. Jencarlos Canela had Five O'Clock shadow, but no beard. No long hair, either. He looked more like a cast member of "Grease", except his hair was sometimes a little messy. And 21st century clothes. And he was more somber, more serious than I am used to, but kind. I would even say he was "brooding", a term I saw used to describe Tom Welling's Clark Kent online. And when brought to Pilate (except when he sang) he showed genuine fear on his face. Peter dressed like fishermen dress today.

The action, if you want to call it that, moved along the streets of New Orleans. The last supper took place under Spanish moss hanging from trees, which reminded me of the magnificent Brookgreen Gardens near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Ironically, the Garden of Gethsemane was not a garden at all, but a grassy area between two great-looking bridges. Cops showed up with blue lights flashing to take Jesus away.

Before the arrest, Chris Daughtry as Judas screamed (young people would call this singing) in what looked like an abandoned oil refinery.

After being arrested, Jesus spoke to two prisoners in orange jumpsuits in the back of a police van. One mocked him while the other humbly asked to be saved.

Peter walked through the streets. One woman yelled to him from a house. Another woman yelled to him in the street. A cop spoke to him in a cemetery. No rooster, though.

Then came the one scene with dialogue that took place on the main stage. Seal did a fine job as Pilate in a suit and tie. Not a mean character at all. And the live audience participated, yelling "Barabbas" when the time came to choose which of the prisoners in orange should be released, and yelling "Crucify him!" at the appropriate time.

We didn't see the event, symbolized by the newly arrived lighted cross, but Perry described it in explicit detail.

You won't believe the ending. I mean you won't believe it.

Actually, that wasn't the end. The New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band performed last. Now THAT'S music!

This production was a little short on detail, but the powerful message came through. If one enjoys the styles of music presented, it is quite an effective delivery of the story of that first Holy Week. Seeing the characters and dialogue as if it was all taking place today may help people understand the story better, and these would make it easier to be introduced to the story if they didn't know it.

It was worth seeing.

Didn't like the way this was done. Started here, went there. Now someone's singing, why I don't understand. Tyler Perry talks, let's introduce the characters - that's good because I had no clue who they were by looking at them. Now there's Mary in a TIGHT royal blue dress with a bit of cleavage. I guess we're really going to take the Passion story in a different direction. Whether I am or am not a prude is not my concern here. Mary wouldn't have been caught dead in a dress that showed her body - modernized version or not. The audience and flashing to Orleans auditorium was distracting. Why do I have to write 10 lines? This is a ridiculous rule. I just wanted to say that this production was not worth my time to try to watch and was way off what I think the Bible would have portrayed as the story of Jesus in modern days.

As a Christian. I felt appalled by this. I'm sorry but this does not have anything to do with God. This is just a show. Come on!!! This is actually annoying. You just cant bring secular music into Christianity. "When love takes over" by Kelly Rowland. Like are you kidding me? There are many Gospel songs out there. I was just about to stop writing and post this then "Whitney Houston's "your love is my love" comes up. I'm done. Tyler Perry explains stuff from the bible and then they user worldly songs. Please and please if you want to do an Easter concert, get in contact with Jesus and ask Him what He wants you to do. My goodness. It's just a showcasing of famous people and a lot of stuff about the hurricane. Why don't you try to truly worship and praise and focus on Jesus with meaningful songs based on scripture. Arrgggghhh.

Last night's "feature" was a preposterous program on the Fox network called "The Passion," which was billed as a dramatization of the life of Jesus — or at least the last week or so of it — but turned into a show I can only call "God-awful." The show opened in a big outdoor stadium in New Orleans, where the entire thing took place, and the big ballyhoo was that it was being performed live. The gimmick — well, there were several gimmicks, but one of them was that the main stadium would be the setting for the orchestra, the chorus and Trisha Yearwood, who played Mary. Jesus and his disciples would be seen in various urban locales making their way to the main venue; they arrived in town for Palm Sunday on a New Orleans trolley and Judas announced his intention to betray Jesus on a weird construction of various pipes — I wondered if they had picked this site because it would be a picturesque venue for him to hang himself from later, but they didn't go that far.

While the cast was moving around the city, in other news a giant white cross was being carried to the main site by a group of volunteers — they were holding it like a coffin instead of dragging it the way the traditional (and wrong) depictions of the Crucifixion have depicted it (the real way a crucifixion was done was the victim carried the top bar of the cross and then it was attached to a permanent stake in the ground — Franco Zeffirelli, in his 1970's TV-movie "Jesus of Nazareth," is the only director I can recall who got it right) — and newscasters were following the procession and asking various parties in it how they felt about being there. What's more, the writer/director, Peter Barsocchini, came up with a script that only gave five of the principals — Jesus (Jencarlos Canela), Peter (Prince Royce), Judas (Chris Daughtry), Pilate (Seal) and Mary (Trisha Yearwood) — featured roles. Christ's other 10 apostles became what Anna Russell would have called "a homogenous chorus — as in milk," basically reduced to following him around and so undifferentiated in Barsocchini's script they're not even listed by name on the show's IMDb.com page — just as "Disciple." Even worse was the lame-brained decision to follow Baz Luhrmann's example in the 2001 film "Moulin Rouge!" and, instead of commissioning a new score (or using an existing pop-rock setting of the Passion Play like Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" or Stephen Schwartz's "Godspell"), to shoehorn in existing pop-rock songs that didn't even begin to fit in to the story. The host — what in Johann Sebastian Bach's time would have been called "The Evangelist" — was Tyler "Madea" Perry, whose continued popularity with the so-called "faith" audience is pretty inexplicable (though give them points for making a Black drag queen into a superstar!), and he was personable but had, like everyone else who actually got a line or more, to recite Barsocchini's awful faith-based dialogue.

The one redeeming (to use a word with religious connotations!) grace of this production was Trisha Yearwood, who isn't exactly one of the most intensely emotional singers of all time but whose cool professionalism soared above the rest of the cast even despite the risible choices of songs for her to sing (she was supposed to be mourning the impending crucifixion of her son and the song they gave her to do that with was the old Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece of bathos, "You'll Never Walk Alone" and the horrible dress she was wearing, a blue thing with a slash across the top of it to reveal the tops of her breasts: an odd costume indeed for someone who was supposed to be playing the Virgin Mother of God. The show's silliest moments were the duet for Jesus and Judas when Jesus learns Judas has just betrayed him (and before he's arrested by helmeted riot police and makes his next appearance in an orange prison jumpsuit — I guess on this show orange was the new Jewish) and the later one for Jesus and Pilate (to quote another Anna Russell line, "I'm not making this up, you know!") to Tina Turner's big song from "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," "We Don't Need Another Hero." (As long as they were using that song, couldn't they have got Tina out of retirement and had her play Mary Magdalene?)

Otherwise "The Passion" was an excessively silly show with a score of such stupefying banality it made Andrew Lloyd Webber sound like Bach by comparison, and limp performances of these bad songs by everyone in the cast aside from Yearwood (I used to really like Seal, but here he sank to the level of his duet partner). I remember the hissy-fit my mom had when she and I watched the trailer for the film of "Jesus Christ Superstar" and she said, "Oh, no, they didn't make Judas Black" — this time, at least, Judas was white and it was Pilate who was Black! It also didn't help that Jencarlos Canela (supposedly a star of telenovelas in Mexico) as Jesus and Prince Royce as Peter looked quite a lot alike — the only visible difference is Peter had more facial hair — or that they were both such mediocre performers they became oppressive screen presences even though they're quite attractive young men who should have been fun at least to look at, if not to hear! Supposedly this sort of setting of "The Passion" has become a regular feature on Dutch TV, where it's been aired regularly since its debut in 2011 — but as far as I'm concerned the Dutch can keep it. And as for Peter Barsocchini: forgive him, Lord, for he knows not what he does!

The Passion is an annual event in Holland. It started of small but has by now become quite the event. It depicts the last days of Jesus Christ from his arrival in Jerusalem until his (mercifully never shown) crucification and resurrection. The Passion features pop-songs which are appropriate for the scenes in which they are sung. Most acting scenes are pre-recorded. There is a large stage with a big choir and musicians who perform the songs live. The storyteller introduces the scenes and the singer who portrays Mary sings her songs live from the stage. I remember the first time it came on in Holland it was really modest and really....not that good. I thought this first US attempt situated in New Orleans was rather good. I liked the song-choices. Trisha Yearwood, Seal and Chris Daughtry were excellent. I never heard of JenCarlos Canela and to be sure he isn't a stereotype kind of Jesus. But he does portray a gentle and vulnerable Jesus. And Tyler Perry was an excellent story-teller. Big thumbs up for all involved

I love Jesus Christ so much I gave it a look and as always with an open mind. It was refreshing to see the venue was outside & live. It was also great to hear the opening choice of song with Yolanda Adams......and then this great selection of songs that was so fitting of the situations in each act. It was as if this was the only time a musical (w/the right choice of songs) could ever be produced. I found myself smiling as w/o noticing I was singing along. I mean, keeping in mind I do not like musicals, yet I was feelin' it.

I think others would go into this production thinking of the so many Jesus stories to maybe ruin it for them, as well as forget that it's a modern take on the old play "The Passion". I am still playing it over & over again because I love listening to it. I makes me relax thinking of joy while taking back to a peaceful memory of when I was 1st introduced to loving Jesus. That's why I took a peak in the 1st place.....and I'm happy enough that I did.