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Jerry Springer: The OperaIs it the Springer or the Song?

By Susannah Clapp in The Guardian Posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2001

Actually, it’s both. This funny, raunchy, foul-mouthed and very twenty-first centure musical about trash TV has got it all

A rare sound burst on to the stage last week: that of musical theatre floating on real invention and engaged with a recognisable world. I’ve heard it only three times in the past five years: in Shockheaded Peter, which called its glorious self a ‘junk opera’; in Tamasha’s Bollywood skit, Fourteen Songs, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and in Adam Guettel’s beautiful bluegrass Floyd Collins – which has yet to receive a big production. Now Kombat Opera has unleashed this sound at BAC with a concert performance of Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer: The Opera. It’s very funny, fairly foul-mouthed and superbly sung. In an age in which most musicals are retro (the National’s Christmas show is a revival of South Pacific), here’s a voice from the future.

There could be nothing more suitable for a satire on Springer than a form which allows the great Confessor to elide himself with Christ. Jerry Springer: The Opera opens with a chorus who send the word ‘Jerry’ sobbing and soaring through the auditorium, elongating the vowels so that what you seem to hear is a ‘Kyrie’. It ends with the furrowed interrogator rising from the arms of a bodyguard who has cradled him, pieta-style, to ascend the stairs that forever separate him from the sinners below.

And what better form than opera to display explosive melodrama in which everyone shouts at the same time? The shouters here include a ‘chick with a dick’ and a man who wants his girlfriend to pin him up in diapers. Each of them does to perfection the shoulder-swaggers, the power-play with the chairs, and the dive into schmaltz: ‘This Is My Jerry Springer Moment’ must become an iconic song. And if you should even start to think that this is pointlessly enjoyable, attend to the final chorus – ‘Jews ‘n’ blacks can go to hell. New York Democrats as well’ – sung by a would-be lap dancer, her backwoodsman husband, who prefers flowers to people, and a jigging line of Ku Klux Klansmen.

Written by Susannah Clapp in The Guardian on 26th August 2001. Filed Under: Jerry Springer: The Opera, Reviews
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