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by Richard Thomas, book and lyrics by Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas, directed by Richard Ouzounian

Hart House Theatre, Toronto

January 16-31, 2009

Why is the Olivier Award-winning musical Jerry Springer: The Opera (2003) receiving its Canadian premiere at a university theatre?  Why has it been performed in New York only for two nights in concert?  At first one might assume it has to do with its extraordinarily crude language or its incredibly lurid and, to fundamentalist Christians, extremely blasphemous subject matter.  Judging from the Hart House production the answer is simple--while the first half is blissfully outrageous and inventive, the second half is boring.

The heyday of The Jerry Springer Show, still on TV, was in the mid-1990s when the nominal talk show’s parade of low class human degradation, complete with physical violence, nudity and a bloodthirsty audience, brought tabloid television to a new low.  As the musical’s title suggests the show’s single joke is the contrast between its low brow content and the high brow pretensions of the music to opera.  Composer Richard Thomas’s rich score references the whole history of classical music from sacred liturgy to baroque opera and oratorio to Carl Orff while still maintaining a pop sensibility.  Meanwhile, Stewart Lee’s lyrics insure no form of profanity, blasphemy or scatology is ignored.  This technique works best in the show’s first half that musicalizes a typical Springer show.  There’s the man cheating on his fiancée with two women and a guy, the husband who tells his wife that he’s an infantilist with a dirty diaper fetish and the woman who confronts her redneck husband with her ambition to be a pole dancer.  Thomas naturally enough uses the rowdy stage audience as chorus.  Unfortunately, when we move into Jerry’s mind in the second half, the creators seem to have used up all their ideas.  The score is not as inventive and the schoolboy idea of Satan (a marionette-like J.P. Bevilacqua) forcing Jerry to hold a show in hell with guests like Adam (Scott Gorman), Eve (Linda Gallant) and Jesus (Benjamin  Mehl) strives to be offensive but goes nowhere.  The show seems to end about three times before it just peters out.

Toronto Star theatre critic Richard Ouzounian provides the efficient direction.  As in the best productions he tries to find a scrap of humanity amid all the heavy satire as with the three-time betrayed fiancée Peaches and Baby Jane (both sung by Jocelyn Howard, who boasts the cast’s strongest voice) and in the key song “I Wanna Sing Something Beautiful” sung by the diaper-man’s wife Andrea (Hayley Toane).  Yet, the desperation in the characters’ knowledge that this is their “Jerry Springer Moment” is often missing.  Byron Rouse is excellent as the slick non-singing Springer, whose false air of concern can’t hide his loathing for his guests.  Jerry Springer: The Opera gradually expanded from a one-act work in 2000 to its present three-act form.  By the end, more exhausted than elated, you can’t help but feel the show is two acts too long. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-01-17.

Photo: Byron Rouse as Jerry Springer (foreground). ©Lydia MacIntosh and Jenny Chisolm.