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 ...