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Jerry Springer: The OperaJerry Springer: The Opera ★★★

By Lyn Gardner in The Guardian Posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2002

A grown man wearing only a nappy is waving a gun. An assortment of white trash and trailer-park lowlifes is weaving around the stage, and at the back, a chorus of Ku Klux Klansmen is merrily tap-dancing. As a bad-taste musical moment the closing number of Kombat Opera’s show rivals the brilliant Springtime for Hitler extravaganza in Mel Brooks’s The Producers.
There is certainly no accounting for taste, and since it first popped up at BAC last August, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s comic opera has acquired cult status. Its current run as a work in progress is an attempt to develop the idea further and see if there is the backing for a possible West End run.

It is a neat enough proposition, and only time will tell if it can be stretched to a full-length stage show. Irony is a difficult pose for either a production or an audience to sustain for more than an hour. The references to lesbian dwarves, chicks with dicks and lap-dancing transsexuals press all the right mirth buttons for an audience that has sacrificed its brains at the altar of daytime TV. But the performance really comes into its own in its more serious moments. After all, the real Jerry Springer Show has you gaping open-mouthed at the TV. Kombat can’t top its awful, unbelievable reality; all they can do is add music to it. But they can do something that the real show can’t: show us how the poor misguided participants actually feel. There is an extraordinarily potent moment when the fat, desperate, angry would-be pole dancer Chantel is forced to dance. Music and libretto fuse in an aria full of grace for the graceless, a hymn for the unloved and unlovely.

Since it doesn’t really have to try too hard to be amusing (although it is interesting that the operatic commercial breaks raise the most laughter), it strikes me that it is in its ability to externalise the internal that the real originality and as yet unrealised theatricality of Jerry Springer: the Opera lies.

· Until February 23. Box office: 020-7223 2223.

Written by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian on 9th February 2002. Filed Under: Jerry Springer: The Opera, Reviews
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