Jerry Springer – The Opera (tour)

With protests outside venues by Christian groups claiming the show is blasphemous, and counter-arguments from groups supporting freedom of speech, one only needs a host for an episode of Jerry Springer to take place outside the theatres. But controversy, religion and protests aside: is this national touring production of the West End smash hit a good show?

For the uninitiated, the musical takes the studio template of the Jerry Springer TV programme – seducing low-life and the unusual onto the airwaves for the modern equivalent of the ancient Coliseum – allowing the moral high ground to bay at the afflicted. And ten years ago when the television show aired, how we loved it. Now, through a series of clichéd fat chicks, gays, and gags about bodily excretions, we wonder what came first – the TV show or the society it portrays?

Salacious and saucy – the language is consistently extreme and the subjects range from risqué to what many would consider taboo – but where Jerry Springer the Opera succeeds is in pointing the finger at the very medium it is an homage to.

On a more sophisticated level, the show offers up a system of religions and religious figures to ridicule using hard-baked, old-fashioned bigotry and chauvinism to show where the basis of all the unhappiness is – simply in trying to be right. The message appears to be that if we all let one another do our thing in peace the world would be a lovely place. But didn’t Hair say the same thing several decades ago?

Rolf Saxon captures the essence of the talk show host and Dean Hussain is strong as the warm-up guy and as Act Two’s Satan, challenging Springer to elicit an apology from Jesus. The company of 21 sings up a storm, with pastiches of everything from Mozart to Sondheim via Hamlisch, backed by a sensational six-piece band under Dan Jackson’s direction, which sounds three times the size.

But it’s essentially a one-gag show. Act One’s stories are funny – the guy who wants to wear nappies, the “chick with a dick”, the tap-dancing Ku Klux Klan – but they all lose their shock factor on a second viewing and Act Two’s Jesus/Satan confrontation drags on into a seemingly endless finale.

I was bowled over when I first saw Springer in London. Perhaps, three years later, the “Jerry Springer moment” has been and gone.

– Elizabeth Ferrie (reviewed at Leicester De Montfort Hall)