📍 SIFF Cinema Downtown: 2100 4th Ave, Seattle (Downtown)
🗓️ Sunday, April 6th – Thursday, April 10th
💰 General admission $20
April doesn’t just mean showers, or 4/20, or [shudders] April Fools’ Day. It’s also when Easter and Passover smack directly into each other. And whether you want to celebrate Christ’s resurrection with an egg hunt or feast with your friends as you retell the story of Exodus while stuffing your face with delicious brisket and kugel, all are welcome at the SIFF Cinema Downtown with their musical twofer of 1973’s Jesus Christ Superstar and 1998’s The Prince of Egypt. Though iconic and era-defining composers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Schwartz never collaborated, this is still cinematic manna from heaven.
In Superstar, Oscar-winning director Norman Jewison shot on location in the Holy Land, giving the sung-through rock opera (only Webber’s second full-length score) a metatextual jagged edge, as a company of players reenact the Passion of the Christ in ways both loopy and devastating. And with Carl Anderson holding the center as narrator and fated betrayer Judas, the film thrums along with a near-psychotic energy that’s impossible to resist.
The Prince of Egypt, meanwhile, was Dreamworks’ second animated film (the mostly forgotten Antz beat it by two months) and a shot-calling of the highest order, taking the swords-and-sandals epics that defined classic Hollywood cinema and mixing it with a Disney Renaissance-challenging bombast that was, alas, just on its way out of favor. While Val Kilmer slays as Moses, Ralph Fiennes turns in even better work as Rameses, and the closing-credits Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston duet of “When You Believe” is one for the ages.
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