The actor who hanged himself on-stage playing Judas in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ in 1997
Despite being arguably the most successful person in the history of theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber peaked early, and his outright best moment is still his third musical, 1970’s Jesus Christ Superstar.
If anything, it’s a miracle that there’s a conversation to be had about that topic because Jesus Christ Superstar is an absolute masterpiece. It’s much more consistent than Lord Andy’s other hits, a 90-minute rabbit punch of a rock musical that sees a creator who has become the go-to artist for unchallenging family entertainment ask a surprisingly challenging question. What if Judas Iscariot was just as much a victim as Jesus Christ himself?
For those of you who don’t know the story of Jesus Christ Superstar (or, y’know, The Bible), Judas is regularly painted as the bad guy in the story of Christ’s execution, and the man who sold him out for 30 pieces of silver, betraying him with a kiss and all that.
Then, in a fit of guilt, he takes his own life, except the musical portrays it slightly differently. Judas finds himself taking his own life not in a fit of guilt, but in a fit of rage. After all, if there is a God, then this has all been his decision from the betrayal downwards.
So, he must have already seen Judas’ end coming, which is why he hangs himself to spite God. It’s an incredibly powerful scene. One that’s done fairly explicitly on-stage, which makes sense. After all, on-stage hangings are a trick that’s been done for literal centuries, but the risks are still very clear and obvious. Thus, it should still be a stunt done by a professional company that knows exactly what they’re doing. Rather than, say, a Greek hotel resort’s summer stock.
If that sounds like a specific example to give, that’s because it’s based on a real-life, tragic event that happened in 1997.
For the past three summers, the Sani Beach Hotel in the Halkidiki peninsula had put on Jesus Christ Superstar as its big open-air musical. They used the same cast and crew each time – one of the most popular members of that cast was the young man playing Judas, Anthony Wheeler, who was 26 years old by the time of the show’s third summer.
Each time he did his character’s death scene, he was meant to attach a safety harness first. Then, he would suspend himself from a scaffold and free himself after the lights went down. For some reason we’ll never know, he didn’t attach the safety harness on that fateful night.
In front of 600 holidaymakers, a number of them children, Wheeler hanged himself for real, and as the traumatised crowd were hurried out of the venue, the show’s director tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate him, and he was pronounced dead on the scene.
A tragic, palpable reminder that there’s no such thing as being too safe, especially when it comes to live theatre, so much could go horribly wrong, even in a situation like this – the company knew the show back to front; they’d been doing it for three years running, yet whether it was a sole act of carelessness or something premeditated, all it took was one deviation from the safety protocols, and a 26-year-old with the world ahead of him was dead.