Hellish: David Soul in Jerry Springer The Opera. Photo / BBC
OPINION:
A notable aspect of the main obituaries for the late US tabloid talk-show host Jerry Springer, at least in the UK, where he was born, is that they all make prominent mention of the Olivier-winning musical that he inspired: Jerry Springer: The Opera.
As notorious as that tooth-and-claw TV show was, its many controversies were nothing compared to that mould-breaking, expletive-filled theatrical extravaganza. Springer himself may have ushered in a vogue for raw reality TV, but only Jerry Springer: The Opera caused a stink that made it all the way to the High Court.
After taking us from a TV studio to hell (literally) and back, the show (co-written by the composer Richard Thomas and the comedian Stewart Lee) suggests, as its fictionalised Springer lies dying, that what will survive of us is love. And what survives of us, too, sometimes, is art.
That Thomas and Lee had created something of consummate artistry was in little doubt when their musical, fully fledged after rapid development, inaugurated Nicholas Hytner’s regime as director of the National on April 29 2003. This despite the fact that it was the rudest, and crudest, show to have graced the Lyttelton stage, the opening lines and lyrics alone reaching straight for the top-shelf in terms of freakish imagery, unfettered swearing and school-boy glee.
To cite one of the moderately printable examples: “Man 1: Excuse me, is this the right room for the Dave Letterman show?” Man 2: You got the wrong room pal, loser! Man 1: F*** you! Man 2: F*** you back!”). As one critic, rhapsodising over the singing invectives, wrote: “Think Handel, Verdi and Wagner, all afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome”.
The collision of beautiful music with coarse verbal content – what Hytner called “its violent marriage of high and low culture… vulgar chaos submitted to the disciplines of classical opera” – was, of course, droll and surprising. But Thomas’ musical verve – it was a bold joke to intone “Jerry” like a ‘Kyrie” – swiftly transcended charges of one-note gimmickry and tilted the evening from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Like The Producers – an inescapable comparison, given that Springer’s tap-dancing Act I Ku Klux Klansmen sequence doffed its pointy hat to the chorus-line of Nazis in Mel Brooks’ musical – here was a show that argued for musical comedy as a supreme form, combining brains, guts and populist appeal.
But whereas the National theatre run was a serene, sell-out occasion, the afterlife of Springer came to resemble a vision out of the TV show itself – causing mayhem and confrontation in ways that had its creators and producers reaching for the sick-bag.
Usually with a major experiment like this, it’s the genesis that’s problematic and needs unpicking. In fact, the evolution, from early try-out workshops at Battersea Arts Centre, where Thomas rewarded good audience suggestions with cans of lager, to the acclaimed 2002 Edinburgh Fringe run, seems unusually blessed. It was the second coming of the show after its 2003 West End transfer, firstly in the shape of a BBC Two broadcast in January 2005, and then a bedevilled tour, that seemed unnaturally cursed.
If the idea behind the TV transmission was to whet appetites outside London, it backfired faster than you can say Mary Whitehouse. In a fashion comparable to Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), there was an outcry about “blasphemous” art in relation to the Christian faith.
The Corporation was deluged with complaints (some 55,000) and there were vigils in protest organised outside BBC premises in London, and other parts. “In all, some 1,500 Christians came out… to stand up for their lord and saviour, mindful that he endured agonies for them”, wrote Stephen Green, head of the advocacy group Christian Voice, who spearheaded the protest, in a letter to those running the venues of the proposed regional tour, threatening prosecution and further protest (“The use of council tax-payers money… to subsidise an offensive, disgusting, blasphemous production will be hard for local councillors to justify” ran one typical line).
Though there was much media interest in the profanity-count in the show – put as high as 8000 obscenities in some reports, and as low as 174 by Lee, who also directed the show – it was the scenes in hell, featuring Springer presiding over spats between Adam and Eve, Jesus, Mary and Satan (Christ admitting to being “a bit gay”) with God self-pityingly singing It Ain’t Easy Being Me that most stoked the ire.
Green and co couldn’t even see the funny side of Jesus’ flip rewriting of “talk to the hand” as “talk to the stigmata”. It was no laughing matter when BBC executives were reported to have gone into hiding. That was later denied but what’s clear is that venues did pull out of the tour under pressure from Christian Voice, Lee stating that a third of them got scared off, resulting in “the collapse of four years of work into financial non-viability”.
“I’ve made about the same amount over the past three years as I would have done if I’d worked as the chief accountant of a catering supplies company in the Thames Valley corridor,” he wryly told me in 2004 after the show’s initial success. “I know because I’ve checked. It’s not a life-changing sum.” With the tour conducted in 2006 more on principle than in any hope of profit, and plans for a Broadway transfer dashed as a result of the backlash, neither he nor Thomas got their just desserts for a show that was a landmark British musical.
On the plus side, Jerry Springer: the Opera became a cause celebre and the experience fed into one of Lee’s most combatively amusing sets to date, 90s Comedian, where he briefed his audience on avoiding being taken to court for blasphemy (”The High Court threw the case out on the grounds that it isn’t 1508″), going through a hospital procedure for colonic diverticulitis and doing unprintable things involving the same region of Christ’s anatomy in a feverish routine that delivered two fingers to the censorious.
In a 2009 interview, Lee bristled that “It did make me feel there was not much point ever trying to reach a mass audience with anything interesting and provocative”. The debacle can thus be viewed as a staging-post in his artistic development.
But who has got the last laugh? With hindsight Jerry Springer: The Opera, and its bitter meta-drama, seems prophetically to have anticipated an era of offence-taking, made easier than in Whitehouse’s day by online technology. Though it has been mounted again, and recently – at Manchester’s Hope Mill theatre – with its comic depiction of characters on the margins, the “pre-op transsexual” (“chick with a dick”) and the diaper fetishist, it doesn’t seem fanciful to imagine outrage, manufactured or otherwise, outside religious circles were it to be attempted on a larger scale.
And as the recent Wakefield ‘Quran’ incident suggested, while the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008, upholders of faith have not rolled back from policing works of art, or life itself.
Conceived prior to 9/11, and long before identity politics became a stalking shadow of cultural life, Springer may come to look like a high-water mark of a society confident about taboo-breaking and not stymied by sensitivity. It repays revisiting. As long as recordings exist of Lore Lixenberg’s Baby Jane singing the rousing number This Is My Jerry Springer Moment (“I don’t want this moment to die/ So dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians”), Springer’s legacy beyond the grave will be assured.
Dolly Parton will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her charity work.