"Jerry Springer: The Opera"
Music by Richard Thomas; book and lyrics by Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas; director, Paul Daigneault; music director/conductor, Dan Rodriguez; choreography, David Connolly; scenic design, Eric Levenson' costume design, Seth Bodie; lighting design, Karen Perlow; sound design, Aaron Mack; projection design, Seaghan McKay; production stage manager, Dawn Schall
Cast:
Jerry Springer, Michael Fennimore; Steve Wilkos, John Porell; Warm-Up Man/Satan, Timothy John Smith; Dwight/God, Luke Grooms; Peaches/Baby Jane, Ariana Valdes; Zandra/Irene/Mary, Amelia Broome; Tremont/Angel Gabriel, Jared Troilo; Montel/Jesus, Brian Richard Robinson; Andrea/Angel Michael/Valkyrie, Kerry A. Dowling; Shawntel/Eve, Joelle Lurie; Chucky/Adam, Wesley Thomas
Performances: Now through May 30, SpeakEasy Stage Company, Stanford Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, 257 Tremont Street, Boston, Mass.
Tickets: BostonTheatreScene box office at 617-933-8600 or www.SpeakEasyStage.com
It's difficult to comprehend why anyone would parade his or her dirty laundry out onto an internationally syndicated talk show 
just to achieve that elusive 15 minutes of fame. But television's Jerry Springer has amassed a fortune exploiting people's desperate desires for notoriety, and vulnerable men and women to this day continue to confess to affairs, aberrations, and dirty little secrets that inevitably lead to on-air cat fights and profanity.
Jerry Springer: The Opera, currently getting a wild and wooly New England premiere at the SpeakEasy Stage in Boston, recreates and amplifies the crazy confrontations that the real Jerry Springer and his team of handlers and security guards orchestrate on a daily basis to the delight of voyeuristic audiences all over the world. Almost completely sung through, this highly controversial and irreverent Olivier Award-winning musical cuts to the heart of the sadness beneath the circus by transforming ludicrous trash talk into a grandly operatic lampoon. An odd-sounding mix, for sure, the contrasting sensibilities nevertheless work hilariously together to deliver surprisingly touching insights into what on the surface looks like simple celebrity-seeking madness.
Act I trots out all of the stock characters and situations that invariably incite Springer's audiences to cheer and jeer as if they were feeding gladiators to lions.
But creators Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas add extreme twists that make the show's warring guests seem at once ridiculous and sympathetic. Cheating fiancées, crack whores, cross dressers, and fetishists cross paths with pole dancers, spankos, religious zealots and the KKK, all singing and dancing their confessions and suppressed desires in heightened chants and dramatic arias. Cast members play both the parody and the passion deliciously, spewing the crudest of epithets in exquisite operatic voice.
The second act comes as a complete surprise. Instead of spreading the joke too thin by giving us more of the same predictable on-air antics, Lee and Thomas turn Jerry Springer into a scathing morality play. Springer is literally sent to Hell to make restitution for all the lives he's ruined by using his Jerrycam to feed dysfunction instead of shed healing light on damaged relationships. His contentious audience Warm-Up Man (get it?) now becomes Satan, threatening Springer with a fate worse than death if he doesn't help him earn forgiveness - and a return to angelic status in Heaven - from a hapless, gospel-singing God. An effeminate baby Jesus, a defensive mother Mary, and a choir of combative angels all become Springer's other worldly "guests" as he attempts to unite the forces of Heaven and Hell through ersatz conflict resolution.
