Mary Magdalen Goes to Broadway! And Hollywood! And Congress!
Andrew Lloyd Webber never let a good story go unsung. In Jesus Christ, Superstar, which premiered on Broadway in 1971, he created a Mary Magdalene who:
Was a prostitute. (That had been the story for 1500 years, why change it?)
Was wildly in love with Jesus, who didn’t love her back. After all, Sir Webber was raised Anglican – which isn’t Catholic, but comes pretty darn close – so he’s not going to give Jesus any romantic, or God-forbid sexual, feelings.
Notable Mary Magdalenes on-screen include:
Barbara Hershey’s Mary in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), directed by Martin Scorsese. Sadly, Scorsese bought into her identity as a prostitute, so his Mary is not only a whore, she embodies sexuality as sin and temptation for poor Jesus.
Anne Bancroft, in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), brings the strongest Mary Magdalene to the screen. Yes, she too is a prostitute (just can’t seem to get away from that), but she becomes one of Jesus’ most faithful and spiritual disciples, the only one who stays with him at the crucifixion, and the one tasked with bringing the message of his resurrection to the others (who are cowering in Galilee).
She’s not even safe from slander in Congress:
George Santos (R-NY) was expelled from the US House of Representatives for numerous violations of House ethics rules and federal criminal law. Before the vote that expelled him, he lamented his fall from political grace on X, griping that he had gone from being the Republican “It Girl” to “Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress.”