Long ago in the West End I went to see Godspell. I was completely entranced by a Jesus who was by turns magnetic, funny, fun to be with and deadly serious, stopping people in their tracks with his pull-no-punches words. Along with the rest of the audience I clapped along, and sang, and cried over the Willows when they hung him on the wire fencing at the back of the stage. But there was one part where I couldn’t do what the audience was invited to do: go on stage during the interval.  The interval was, curiously, the part of the production that left a lasting impression on me, because – unlike most theatrical performances – the audience was invited onstage to share a glass of wine with the cast. Back there in the West End I was sat up in the Gods (probably with my mum and sister as we used to go to London once a year to see something) and anyway I was only about 8 or 10 – too young to be drinking wine in the West End. But I wanted so badly to be up there, with the 40 or so people who looked so much part of the action with their cool clothes and their glasses of wine.

It was some years later that I realised the interval added something to the theological meaning of the whole production. We are so used to the cast and the audience being separated by the invisible barrier at the edge of the stage. Fairly often over recent decades that barrier has been broken: improvisatory performers will invite an audience member on stage and work their contribution into the performance (think, for instance, of Neil Finn (Crowded House) or Frank Skinner (Comedian). Godspell paints Jesus as a clown-like reformer: gone is the mystical, other-worldly figure of so many movies about him, and instead he is the leading light among his followers but also decidedly one of them. There is no resurrection in Godspell (or at least it’s only vaguely implied); the impact is all about the transformation of the crowd, who are completely involved with him, and he with them. He doesn’t preach and they follow; instead he begins each story and the cast then take over, speaking his words and acting out the stories themselves. This interactive relationship is then spread through the theatre as the cast run through the audience, so that by the time the invitation comes to join the cast onstage, the sense is complete that we, the audience, are also to join in, to hang our lyres On The Willows, and to become builders of the Beautiful City.

Last night I took my own son to see the Godspell revival in New York. It’s at the Circle in the Square theatre, which is fairly small; even though we were almost on the back row we were still a stone’s throw from the stage, and I wondered as the lights went down whether this revival production would include the interval invitation.

The production was a quite brilliant revival: all the elements and songs from the original stage show and the 1973 movie were there, but reinterpreted – right from Jesus deciding what he will wear, to the re-working of some of the songs as rap or hip hop. The staging was fantastic – a dozen or so trap doors opened and closed to reveal a baptismal pool, ten trampolines, and a piano. The choreography was cleverly put together for a theater in the round, so that every scene rotates to play to the whole audience. The cast are quite brilliant, with a range of musical and acting skills that leaves you breathless right to the end of the show. The only odd moment for me was that just as Jesus was carried, lifeless, from the stage, the audience broke out in applause. I guess people knew it was the final song, or maybe there is a kind of conditioning that you applaud when a song ends come what may. All the same, my instinct was that if the audience could have responded at that point with a deathly silence, it would have been altogether more apt. The cast bounces back on stage two minutes later for a reprise (the implied resurrection), so it’s not like the show ends in darkness.

And the interval?  Sure enough, “Jesus” invited us down to drink wine with the cast. This time, the wine was actually a mouthful of a kind of communion cherry juice, served in tiny plastic cups. But the wine isn’t the point. It’s crossing the boundary that matters. Without a moment’s thought, I gave my reluctant son a push in the right direction, and we went on to the stage.