Theater March 2008
Trial & error
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 televisions Jerry Springer Show would seem to be tailor-made for operatic treatment. At least thats 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 Londons 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 shows 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...
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