From The Sunday Times - 13th January 2002

Five minutes into a performance of Jerry Springer: The Opera (JS:TO) at the Battersea Arts Centre, in south London, last August, there occurred one of those moments in artistic endeavour when a collective intake of breath is heard from those witnessing it. In part, this was to do with the experimental nature of the evening: singers clasped scores to their chests; accompaniment came from a single grand piano; and the invitation for audience feedback was boldly made in the programme. But chiefly, this audible "haaaahhhh" was caused by the realisation that what we were about to experience was opera - as flagged by the title - but not as we knew it.
A warm-up man was goading the chorus of singers assembled stage left. Wearing an ear-piece and carrying a clipboard, he repeatedly asked the throng: "Are you ready?" The chorus, playing the part of the haranging rabble that graces (if that is the word) the average Jerry Springer show, sang impatiently: "Yes, we're ready." Eventually, pushed beyond endurance by the man's questioning, they screamed: "Oh, for f**k's sake, we are ready." The audience gasped, sneaking looks at each other that signalled both shock and excitement.
Nearly everyone who has seen JS:TO seems to have the same reaction, leading to levels of anticipation about the show's February run that terrify Richard Thomas, its composer.
"Don't remind me of this," he pleads. "I'm in denial. And that's a very powerful place."
Thomas, his director and co-librettist Stewart Lee (who writes for the music pages of this section) and the opera singer and JS:TO linch-pin Lore Lixenberg are drinking champagne in central London, in a manner that suggests not so much complacent, premature celebration as a desperate attempt to steady nerves in the face of their mounting terror about what the coming three-week run at the BAC holds in store. Certainly, they have a lot to live up to.
"Oh God, the press we had was just incredible," Thomas recalls, with a rolling-eyed loopiness that people overendowed with creativity often exhibit. "I made one of the reviews into a little paper hat, and wandered around in it until Stewart ripped it off my head. I was delirious."
The composer who honed the skills he so readily deprecates writing music for stand-ups such as Frank Skinner, Harry Hill and Simon Munnery, had the idea for JS:TO after the success, in 2000, of Tourette's Diva, the sequence of 10-second put-downs he set to an operatic score featuring two sopranos. Tourette's itself had sprung from his novel way of dealing with hecklers during a long and, he insists, inglorious career as a musical comedian, which involved the classically trained Lixenberg delivering ripostes such as "F*** off, you c***" and "You remind me of chemotherapy" in full-throated Wagnerian tones.
This splendidly disrespectful approach to the operatic idiom bears glorious fruit in JS:TO, a mad musical melange that throws everything from gospel to glissandi, Broadway to Bach, calypso to coloratura and Motown to Mozart into the blender, then flicks the switch. Some people got into a terrific lather, with it stirring up the old "musical v opera" debate.
"It's a pointless quibble," argues Tom Morris, the BAC's artistic director and the man whose enlightened policy of workshopping new musical stage works during a series of annual festivals allowed Thomas to develop his initial idea. "The cultural values that the word opera seems to have attracted in Britain over the past 100 years, which are to do with snobbery and expense, are just nonsense."
Lee is equally forthright: "I think the thing with so-called expensive opera is that the audience expects to be edified, and only the next day realise whether they enjoyed it or not. Whereas with Jerry Springer, they are entertained, and those from an opera background who came to see it were confused by how much they'd enjoyed it. I don't think they could tell if it was good, because they'd liked it too much."
The composer himself is at pains to stress that he has no particular axe to grind, pointing out that JS:TO was the result, first, of too many late-night sessions watching the show, inebriated, and, second, of the desire to "write something as commercial as I could, on the grounds that it might actually be commercial".

Happy accident or not, the show caused a huge stir in August, when the first act was presented, with sketches from the second tacked on after the interval. The performances next month will be the first of the finished article, although, as the ever fretting Thomas reminds me, "as Sondheim said, you don't write a musical, you rewrite it".
Among those attending will no doubt be Nicholas Hytner, the incoming director of the National Theatre, who raved about the August run and has had discussions with Thomas with a view to commissioning his next work. Possibly the Broadway producer Hal Prince, too.
What showgoers, famous and anonymous alike, will get is a musical and dramatic journey that seeks to replicate the madness of Springer's show - its confessionals, its slanging matches, its almost gladiatorial atmosphere - in a way that justifies the "opera" part of its title. Diaper Man, Chick with a Dick, a Ku Klux Klan backwoodsman who secretly collects flowers: these are just some of the grotesques played by a small cast in multiple roles. All the while, a profanity-strewn dialogue continues between chorus (the audience) and principals (Jerry's guests), until the frontman takes a bullet. The great man himself seems to approve, says Lee. "His comment was: 'There have been operas about more tragic things than my show. How could I not be honoured?'"
The newly minted second half takes this into new realms, with the arrival of the jazz singer Ian Shaw's show-stopping devil, and a journey into allegory that pitches Blake against Milton and Jesus against Satan, with Jerry in the unaccustomed position of moral arbiter.
Morris, pushed to divulge the identities of the top theatre honchos rumoured ot be pestering him to let them give the show the big treatment in a large house, comes over uncharacteristically coy. "Yes," he says, after a long pause, "we have had discussions. But I'm not, I mustn't..." And he leaves it there.
"What's great about the TV show," concludes Thomas, "is that you have eight people screaming at each other, and you can't understand a word they're saying. Which is just like..." Opera? "Exactly."
The stock theatrical effusions seem entirely justified. Any or all of them - "Mortgage your home, sell anything to get a ticket"; "I urge you to see this show"; "If you go to one event this year, make it this one" - will do.
Now - are you ready?

Jerry Springer: The Opera, BAC, SW11,
February 5 - 24