Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
I’ve watched it a lot as a kid and saw one live performance of the russian translation. I heard its songs a lot on the radio. Re-watching it now — it’s just as good and it works much better as a musical, than as separate songs.
Normal, safe, song structure requires repetition of two parts in turns, so you have a proven tension-release cycle. Some rap songs also love to use hooks and bridge, but that only ends up in those parts being the best parts of the track (well in rap especially some bridges are the worst parts, given to some pop singers for brand recognition), which in best case will be cut by a DJ Rotten Faggot and looped over some pathetic most bland electro-house to make a popular track for a nightclub. But these songs are structured as classical academic pop music (which entirely swept by popey mozart creating safe, smooth, repetitive tracks) — they try to tell a story and usually are created for plays (duh).
All of these tracks have good parts and incredibly good parts, but they don’t come back to them — blink, and they are gone. Seeing the story they are telling, or at least remembering it, makes them much more fulfilled. The music’s great.

The visual narrative of this movie is ahead of its time for, like, two ages of art. And the structure is current in the 201x’s repostmodernism. It’s representative of USA’s zeitgest (the tail end of it, though) and the whole feel of a hippie and new age spiritual exercise of staging a play for no one, but participants themselves is rare for cinema. The casting is great and is not of a typical Hollywood homogeneous type. These pieces fit perfectly and create a great whole.

Jesus Christ Superstar (2000)
This adaptation represents the late 90s vibe — instead of new age hippies there are street rad culture, dark action movie aesthetics, slightly different take on music, and amazing over the top acting and with most of the cast having more unconventional vocals. While the popular adaptation is still serious, this one is having fun and creates a different take on the musical, constructing its own personality. The Christ is a metrosexual, Judas is always on the brink of squealing, Pilate is eye-poppingly overstressed, priests are a collection of Bond villains, Herod is outright outstanding — running on the knife’s edge above absolutely terrible, but keeping it steady. All these decisions are perfect for a 2000s take on the story.

But overall this isn’t on par with 1973 version only because it doesn’t take much liberty with the music. Sometimes it does slightly R’n’B takes on the songs and that’s all. The musical was written in 70s and it has 70s music, if it had a collection of 90s genre it would be a great millennium picture, making a brief résumé of the decade.