Jesus Christ Superstar, Open Air Theatre, London, review: Enjoyable but stops short of a miracle

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice made a musical goldmine out of Golgotha with this 1971 rock-opera treatment of the last seven days of Christ's life. In Timothy Sheader’s 45th anniversary production – the first time the show has ever been presented al fresco – the youthful energy and inventiveness of the score come across with unforced verve. If time has been less kind to the slangy wit of the lyrics (“What's The Buzz?”), the drive of the eclectic music with its unusual syncopated rhythms and vertiginous switches of tone can't be denied.

The most recent revival, four years ago, was an arena tour that set the proceedings against the backdrop of contemporary anti-capitalist demonstrations of the Occupy kind. In this new production, a less specific 21st-century feel is conveyed by Tom Scutt's design: a rust-red industrial scaffold frame with a gigantic cruciform catwalk. Declan Bennett is a disgruntled, guitar-playing hipster-Jesus who can seem deficient in charisma in the first half; you wonder why his followers, clad in baggy, grey street-clothes, keep shielding their eyes from the light in Drew McOnie's choreography. But when Bennett communicates Christ's agonised inner life, in the soliloquy “Gethsemane” after the interval, his go-for-broke soul-bearing intensity stops the show.

The damned-either-way dilemma of Judas is conveyed with terrific sardonic ferocity by Tyrone Huntley, whose voice can slice and swing and soar into tormented falsetto. I found the irony and despair in his lines reprising “I Don't Know How To Love Him” – “He's just a man/He's not a king ... He scares me so/When he's cold and dead/Will he let me be” – more moving than the straight rendition of the song earlier by Anoushka Lucas's Mary Magdalene, who is unaffected to the point of being anodyne.

Judas's fingers emerge dripping with silver paint and permanently dyed as if he's caught a disease when he dips them into the chest containing his reward. The scourging of Christ is represented by his being pelted with handfuls of gold glitter at each stroke – sadistic mockery but, in the longer-term, perhaps a paradox. These simple, arresting images seemed, to me, more effective than the high-camp spectacle of, say, Peter Caulfield's Herod in voluminous gold pleats, like a bloated decadent Pierrot, backed by a cavorting group of dancers whose heads are perched on bloody plate-ruffs as if John the Baptist has set off a fashion trend.

In the end, even the best productions of Jesus Christ Superstar can't quite disguise the fact that this is a rock oratorio rather than a sustained piece of drama. Sheader's revival is enjoyable but, on that point, stops short of a performing miracle.

To 27 August; 0844 826 4242