Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The 4th season of Amazon’s Transparent dropped on Friday, delivering ten episodes of the Pfefferman clan finding themselves and reckoning with their pasts, this time in the history-rich environs of Israel. As with previous seasons of Transparent, certain motifs emerge as you’re watching. Think of the flashbacks to Weimar Germany in season 2, or even how the “To Shell and Back” runner paid off so beautifully with her singing “Hand in My Pocket” in the season 3 finale. It would be hard to miss season 4’s major recurring motif, the threading of music from the 1970 ecclesiastical rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s a motif that was both insistent and yet also perfectly in keeping with the Pfeffermans we’ve come to know and (mostly) love.
Jesus Christ Superstar was a rock opera conceived by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, the tandem who would later create blockbuster musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Cats. With a story based on the Gospels, JCS is a sung-through (i.e. no speaking moments in between the songs) musical following Jesus Christ during the events leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection — though with an increased and complicated role for figures like Judas Iscariot and Mary Magdalene. It was released as an album first and after becoming a huge success (it topped the Billboard Pop Albums chart in 1971), it was the translated into a stage musical and then ultimately a movie.
You’d think that a musical with a subject matter so intensely about Christianity wouldn’t be an intuitive fit for the intensely Jewish Pfeffermans, but that would be disregarding the kind of impact Jesus Christ Superstar made in the early ’70s. Because it offered a version of the Passion that offered new perspectives on the New Testament — particularly the Judas and Mary Magdalene stuff — Jesus Christ Superstar was shunned and banned for being a sacrilege. Instead, JCS found a home among feelings-y liberal intellectuals, post-’60s hippies, and musical-theater-loving Jews, which basically sums up the Pfeffermans perfectly.
On Transparent, the music of Jesus Christ Superstar acts as a kind of thread connecting the past and the present. Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) remembers listening to the album while Shelly (Judith Light) was pregnant with Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), when then leads her to a memory of her younger self making a deal with God that she would set aside her complicated and confusing feelings about her own gender and sexuality if Ali survived her premature birth.
In the scenes in the present, the songs from JCS appear within the scenes, at first accidentally, as if by kismet, but then purposefully. Even a little bit on-the-nose. Like when, while on the bus headed to Jerusalem, Sarah puts on “What’s the Buzz?” for a family sing-a-long that actually includes the line “When do we ride into Jerusalem?” It’s honestly a perfectly Sarah moment, as she generally confuses very obvious gestures for more subtly subversive ones.
The Jesus Christ Superstar motif also makes for a sweet and beautiful wrap-up to the season, in the form of the song “Everything’s All Right.” In the musical, it’s sung by Mary Magdalene as she washes Jesus’s head and feet and tries to calm him for what’s to come. It’s a beautiful (if darker than you realize at first) piece of music that made for a perfect choice to score the Transparent season 4 trailer. On the show proper, it’s sung by Maura, her boyfriend Donald (John Getz), Davina (Alexandra Billings), and Shelly as they enjoy each other’s company under the stars, telling stories about the Israel trip and how much they loved Jesus Christ Superstar way back when. Their singing underscores a look at the three Pfefferman children and where they’re all situated at season’s end.
As is typical for Transparent, the song helps to wrap up the season in a moment of grace tinged with uncertainty. It pulls together past and present, religious and secular, all under the umbrella of something searching and transgressive and transformative.
