From The Times 2, August 24 2001

OPERA
Jerry Springer
BAC SW11

SOME people think Jerry Springer is the host of an infamous freak-show which exploits inarticulate human misery for the entertainment of the middle classes. This, of course, is half the fun. But until you've been in the grungier parts of the United States it's hard to realise that this high priest of self-expression is perhaps also the greatest satirist on television, holding a mirror of disgust to the place where the American soul used to be.

Richard Thomas has set himself the task of operatising the peculiar human dramas of Springer, and captures the desperate mimicry of lives that are meaningless until televised in music which parodies everything from Bach chorales to ragtime and gospel. This is not a show to take granny to: it relies heavily upon the unarguable notion that swear-words set to sophisticated music are irreducible funny.

Jerry Springer: the Opera is exactly what it says on the tin, a succession of human exhibits whose big moment has come to tell their slack-jawed loved ones and gawping millions stuff that would be far too mortifying to say in private. Maybe we've seen it all before: a man discovers his girlfriend is a pre-op transvestite, while he is revealed as a gay thanatomaniac? Old hat..... but as in the real Jerry, these stories develop their own momentum, the stage gradually fills with guests of increasingly intricate perversion and a battery of beloved catchphrases in response to the stage audience's growing loathing: "Talk to the hand, the face ain't listening...". Short and varied enough to maintain a suitable level of hilarity, the show nods to more traditional operatic forms with rhapsodic asides as the characters reveal ever more about themselves: thus a wistful threnody to the many joys of coprophilia - you get the picture. Commercial breaks are supplied by the studio audience and are a hideously accurate pastiche of the pervasive white noise of American life: "Give it to Jesus, or alternatively die"; "No motivation? No worries, no trouble, Novocaine", set to a jolly Tom Lehrer-like medley of tunes.

The six singers really sweat for their supper, each performing a number of characters with appropriate pathos and raucousness, in music which demands range as well as technique. Martin Lowe vamps indefatigably on the piano, Rick Bland is an uncannily lifelike Jerry and Andrew Brooke as the mythical bouncer Steve will have more to do when a fight director has been hired. The surprise ending of this semi-staged performance leaves room for more, and I don't think we need worry unduly about Jerry: like all American superheroes, he is of course immortal.

Robert Thicknesse