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TheaterMarch 2008 Trial & error by Brooke Allen On Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall, The Lifeblood at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New Jerusalem at the Classic Stage Company, and Two Thousand Years at the New Group. What are the necessary plot ingredients of grand opera? Passion, betrayal, tragedy, doomed love, violence. By those standards, the shriekfests on television’s Jerry Springer Show would seem to be tailor-made for operatic treatment. At least that’s what the British composer and author Richard Thomas and his co-author Stewart Lee decided, and their adaptation of this supremely theatrical material for the musical stage, Jerry Springer: The Opera, was a huge hit in the U.K., running in London’s West End from 2003 to 2005, collecting the Olivier Award for best new musical and touring the U.K. throughout 2006. Even in secular England there were plenty of gripes about the show’s profanity and blasphemy, with various Christian organizations staging protests. These were prompted not only by the quantity of four-letter words, extreme even by David Ma ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 March 2008, on page 36 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/trial-error-3797
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Already a print subscriber? click for online access by Brooke Allen On In the Heights at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Almost an Evening at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, Parlour Song at the Atlantic Theater, and The Four of Us at Manhattan Theatre Club. by Brooke Allen On Conversations in Tusculum at the Public Theater, The Cherry Orchard Sequel at LaMaMa ETC., Gray Area at the Barrow Group, and Next to Normal at the Second Stage Theater. by Brooke Allen On the revival of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County, and the return to Broadway of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming forty years after its debut. by Brooke Allen On Hair at the Delacorte Theater, Noël Coward in Two Keys at the Berkshire Theater Festival, and Buffalo Gal at Primary Stages. by Brooke Allen On Of Thee I Sing at Bard Summerscape, and The Understudy & Broke-ology at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. by Brooke Allen On Gypsy at the St James Theatre, Boeing-Boeing at the Longacre Theater, and The New Century at Lincoln Center. New from The New Criterion: ‘Free speech in 
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