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 Mamet standards, but because of the show’s flippant
treatment of Biblical characters: in Act II, after Jerry has
been shot, he descends to hell and emcees a special episode
in which Jesus, Satan, Mary, and God air their grievances
against each other and the world.

Could this fly in Christian America, even in relatively
godless New York? Producers have clearly doubted it: a
projected move to Broadway in 2005 was dropped due to lack
of financial backing, and the same thing happened a year
later, though there were small, limited runs in Chicago and
Memphis. Now a large-scale concert version of the piece has
come to Carnegie Hall for two nights only,