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Jerry Springer: The OperaJerry Springer: The Opera

National Theatre, London

By Michael Billington in The Guardian Posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2003

Reviewing an already acclaimed show is a bit like arriving sober at a party where everyone else is drunk. But everything one has heard about this show in its previous incarnations at Battersea and Edinburgh turns out to be true: it is lewd, rude and outrageous and yet manages to turn trash TV into something musically sophisticated.

If one were looking for a precedent it would be The Threepenny Opera which showed that low life could appropriate high art. But here the joke is taken even further in that the rowdy revelations and carnival vulgarities of a typical Jerry Springer talk show are set by Richard Thomas to chorales and anthems evoking Bach and Handel.

The guests may be two-timing bisexuals, overweight pole-dancers or diaper-clad coprophiles but their problems and the studio audience profanities are accompanied by music that has echoes of the sublime. It is this contrast between form and content that gives the show its constant elan.

But underneath that the book, by Thomas himself and Stewart Lee, touches on a genuine issue: whether TV is a mirror or a moral agent. In the second half the talk show host, who has been shot in a studio brawl, is transported to hell where he is confronted by the wrecked lives of his guests.

“I don’t solve problems, I just televise them,” he protests. But there seems a kind of rough justice in his being forced to arbitrate between Satan and God in a diabolical chat show and, for all its shock and schlock tactics, the show implies that TV has a moral responsibility.

Thomas and Lee also have a neat trick of extricating themselves from holes which they have dug. Just when the schoolboy blasphemies begin to pall, they come up with a genuinely funny idea like a white-suited God, excellently played by Benjamin Lake, who sings It ain’t easy being me.

And, even though I find the first act climax of a toetapping Ku Klux Klan less than hilarious, the second act finale is as funny as anything in The Producers.

But the supreme merit of Lee’s Lyttelton production is that it is superbly sung. David Bedella brings real flash and dazzle to a warmup man who turns into the devil. Lore Lixenberg and Valda Aviks as studio victims scrap over their cheating lover like rival sopranos in a Donizetti opera.

And Michael Brandon as Springer himself has exactly the right mix of observant blandness and sanctimonious creepiness when he protests that he abominates violence unless it’s in a “carefully controlled environment.” But that is a mark of the genuine wit that pervades this exhilarating foul-mouthed fiesta.

Written by Michael Billington in The Guardian on 30th April 2003. Filed Under: Jerry Springer: The Opera, Reviews
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