Jesus Christ Superstar has long been one of my favourite musicals. An early offering by the dream-team of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, I’m of the opinion that it was the pinnacle of their oeuvre.

The pair broke new ground by covering a sacred story in a modern way - The Passion as Shakespearean tragedy, set to a mind-blowing score heavy on metal, funk and even jazz.

Showing Jesus’s more human failings, giving Judas equal billing with the son of God, depicting Mary Magdalene as a quasi-love interest, was certainly irreverent - the BBC actually banned it as sacrilegious.

Yet the original production was a box-office smash, producing several enduring numbers. Call it the Jerry Springer musical of its time, if you will.

This week, the 50th anniversary tour plays at the Hall For Cornwall. The question is, does it sound as fresh half a century on, in a world that is in many ways very different to the one it was written in?

The answer, I’m glad to say, is a definitive yes. This production is loud and bold, with top-notch rock musicians hidden amongst the industrial set.

With his baseball hat, T-shirt and acoustic guitar, the effect was very much to imagine what Christ might have looked like had he lived today, while the visceral ensemble choreography created a mob energy that was oppressive, often threatening – as imaginable in our times as it would have been two millennia ago.

The main cast were superb. Ian McIntosh as Jesus and Shem Omari James as Judas matched each other song for song, their energy lending intense emotional depth to each number. Stand-out moments included Jesus lamenting in the garden of Gethsemane, while the use of silver paint to represent Judas’ “bloody money” was genius.

A magnificently evil set of Pharisees delivered acidly comical numbers, with Jad Habchi’s bass Caiaphas contrasting brilliantly with Matt Bateman’s stratospheric tenor Annas. Hats off to Timo Tatzber’s Herod, too, whose Charleston-style cameo was a velvet glove concealing an iron fist.

Hannah Richardson as Mary Magdalen was simply luminous, while Ryan O’Donnell gave a pitch-perfect portrait of Pontius Pilate as a conflicted man, every bit a “innocent puppet” as Christ himself. His final, frustrated condemnation of Christ, and the subsequent segue into the musical’s most famous number, took my breath away.

That said, I found the title track – the one everyone is guaranteed to know - an anti-climax. Was it down to familiarity, or because we’d heard an embarrassment of riches leading up to it?

No matter. The entire audience rose as one when the lights went down. A triumph. I would have been happy to go back again, and again.

Jesus Christ Superstar continues until Saturday night. If you want to know the inside story on how this and other shows were created, join an audience with Hall For Cornwall honorary president Sir Tim Rice on Wednesday evening.