Opera aficionados beware. A new figure has entered the landscape of music’s most refined genre, and he brings with him the stories of trailer park tragedy and welfare woe.
Yes, none other than Jerry Springer — the former Cincinnati mayor who hosts a self-titled talk show on which buxom women exchange violent blows over men who prefer to sleep with transvestites — is now the subject of an opera, produced by one of Britain’s fastest-rising comics.
Jerry Springer: The Opera features classically trained professional singers performing music inspired by Mozart, Handel, Gilbert & Sullivan and rock opera. Produced for the government-funded Battersea Arts Centre, it is the brainchild of comedian and composer Richard Thomas and his Kombat Opera Company.
“The Jerry Springer Show is very excessive and so are most operas, although this must be the first opera to include lap dancing as a subject,” Thomas says. “Like the show, opera takes extremes very well. It’s about murder and infidelity. You can have singers screaming ‘You whore!’ and then musically bring an extra story to it.”

A Springer fan, Thomas hit upon the concept last year after writing and producing Kombat Opera’s Tourette’s Diva, a black-comedy opera about a psychotic mother and child that aired on the BBC.
He says he used that experience to develop a 10-minute musical segment about Springer’s critically reviled talk show and played it as part of a one-man show at the BAC. Two months later, he tested the idea again with four professional singers. By August, the production had grown into its present incarnation.
Running just under two hours, the opera has a setting that mimics the TV program and is packed with the same kinds of characters mired in jaw-dropping dysfunction one finds on any given episode of Springer’s show. On stage, a chorus of straight-faced vocalists plays the part of the studio audience, chanting “Jerry … Jerry … Jerry.” In pitches ranging from soprano to bass, they utter repeated coloraturas such as “My mum used to be my dad.”

The drama, which comprises a series of turns in the guests’ scandal-ridden lives, includes Kylie (played by Andrew Emerson) informing her boyfriend that she is a he.
Montel (Wills Morgan) tells his girlfriend Andrea (Lucy Stevens) that he wants to be her “baby.” So, he enters the studio wearing nothing but a diaper and sucking his thumb. When a disgusted Andrea rejects him, on comes Baby Jane (Lore Lixenberg), who’s happy to fulfill Montel’s fantasy.
But there is some substantial social commentary lurking beneath the lowbrow, profane content. As Baby Jane, Lixenberg exudes tremendous pathos while belting out, Judy Garland-style, “This Is My Jerry Springer Moment” — the story of a nobody who’s finally achieved her 15 minutes of TV fame.
Recently, Thomas and director Stewart Lee introduced a new segment in which the Springer character (Rick Bland) dies and Jesus Christ and Satan appear to do battle for the souls of his oddball guests. Lee thinks the scenes add a more overtly intellectual aspect to the opera.

“It sounds simple and obvious, but I think people who’ve never been to an opera before will come and see it,” Lee says. “The Bible’s Old and New Testaments are metaphors for human behavior, and Jerry Springer seems to have a better grasp of the practicalities of human behavior.”
The goal is to turn the workshop production into a full-blown opera for the West End, London’s equivalent of Broadway. Already, British theater director Richard Eyre and Broadway producer Harold Prince have expressed interest. The British-born Springer endorsed the idea in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Judging strictly from the packed house left rolling in the aisles with laughter during one of the workshop stints in September, Thomas just might have a hit on his hands.
The first production of the completed work is scheduled for February at the BAC. By then, we should know whether the fictional Springer goes to heaven with Jesus or, like Mozart’s immoral Don Giovanni, follows Satan into the abyss of hell.