Jerry Springer the Opera (review)

For most who watch it, The Jerry Springer Show is no doubt a guilty pleasure, something like an addiction to junk food. Now Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas have broughtthe trauma and tawdriness of American television's most controversial talk show to the National Theatre in London. Part criticism of the show, part commentary on American culture more generally, Jerry Springer The Opera is a frothy mix of disparate dramatic and musical forms that ultimately challenges us to confront our own complicity as spectators of ritualized humiliation.

Humiliation is the name of the game. After an introductory chorus, the first act of the production offers a familiar, if tame, version of the television show, complete with stagehands that function as referees and an all-too-live studio audience. The topic is guilty secrets, the mode distinctly confessional. Dwight tells his fiancé Peaches of his infidelities with her best friend Zandra and with transsexual Tremont. Montel hesitantly announces to his girlfriend Andrea that he desires to wear diapers and shit his pants. Shawntel wants to be a pole dancer at a strip club, despite her obesity and the protests of hillbilly husband Chucky and mean-spirited mother Irene. What is the purpose of such displays? One typically confesses out of a sense of contrition, a desire to be forgiven, and a willingness to make reparation. Jerry Springer The Opera offers little forgiveness, still less repentance. Characters instead step in front of the camera because, in the words of Montel's masochistic playmate Baby Jane, they want their Jerry Springer-moment. With no obvious talent, the best they can hope for is derision; the on-stage audience, which like its television counterpart is a kind of chorus, heaps it on, offering some sympathy but mostly jingoistic judgment ("chick with a dick," "crack whore") on these pathetic yet defiant rebels against common morality and good taste.

The quiet eye of this emotional storm is Jerry himself. The character in Jerry Springer The Opera exhibits more false sincerity, though less humor, than his real-life counterpart. He summarily dismisses both the over-zealous Warm-Up Man and his under-developed conscience (wonderfully portrayed as a comic version of Tony Kushner's angel). When the emotionally wounded Andrea wants to sing of hope for a new life and love, he rushes her off, telling her to "save it for the green room." Devastation makes for good ratings, and ratings alone matter. Or at least that's the case until Jerry is shot at the end of the first act and subsequently finds himself in Hell, with a new set of cards to read. Here, as tabloid television meets medieval mystery play, Jerry Springer The Opera becomes highly original. The fired Warm-Up Man returns as Satan (only one example of creative double casting) and coerces Jerry into seeking an apology from Christ. But if the characters are now epic in scale, then the tone of the accusations and excuses is all too familiar. Christianity appears to be a religion of dysfunctional families and unmet needs: Adam accuses Eve of being a whore; the Virgin Mary accuses Christ of failing to care for her in her old age; everyone becomes annoyed when Christ keeps reminding them of the Crucifixion.

Because Jerry Springer The Opera privileges such detractors, it is tempting to say that Lee and Stewart are, like Blake's Milton, of the Devil's own party. It would probably be unwise, however, to load too much theological freight on any dramatic vehicle in which God appears as a superannuated Elvis crooning "It ain't easy being me." (The attitude towards organized religion is more emphatically expressed in one of the humorous commercials displayed on television monitors in the first act: "Give money to Jesus—or die a horrible death.") Yet if traditional theology is treated as a hoax, then the morality play at the heart of Jerry Springer The Opera is not. The...