Playwrights: Richard Thomas ( music ) , Stewart Lee and Thomas ( book and lyrics )
At: Bailiwick Repertory, 1229 W. Belmont
Phone: 773-883-1090; $25-$40
Runs through: July 8
By Jonathan Abarbanel
The North American premiere of Jerry Springer—The Opera, the award-winning London musical, is Bailiwick's largest-ever production, with 29 performers and an eight-person orchestra. It's every bit as lurid as the trash TV talk show which inspired it, but four-letter words aren't bleeped. Thus, composer Richard Thomas sets 'fuck' as 'Fu-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-ck' in a Handel-like run of competitive male coloratura between a baritone Satan and tenor Jesus. Oh, did I mention that it's not only scatological, but also mocks Christian iconology?
Purposefully and fulsomely vulgar and impious, Jerry Springer—The Opera also is shockingly funny and thoroughly theatrical. For example, an unexpected tap dance by hooded Ku Klux Klan members brings down the house. Thomas' music is a dazzling pastiche drawing from Bach motets, Handel, Broadway song-and-dance, Andrew Lloyd Webber, liturgical music and Marc Blitzstein. The vocal parts are challenging, and the chorus has a huge role. It's serious music that is highly frenetic with 37 numbers, few of which run over two minutes.
Act I portrays a typical Jerry Springer show. A yahoo audience demands 'pimps in bad suits' and 'a chick with a dick,' and Jerry doesn't disappoint, presenting a cheating fiancé; a transvestite; an infantilism fetishist; and a pole dancer with a redneck husband. Springer's conscience, a personal Valkyrie who sings to him, occasionally tweaks him but he dismisses her. 'It's easy to occupy the moral high ground. What's more difficult is to occupy the moral low ground,' he says.
Springer remains curiously neutral, a passive and non-judgmental facilitator. Perhaps for this reason, in Act II Satan makes Springer host a special show in hell in which Satan confronts Jesus, who confesses to being a little gay. When God intervenes—dressed in white pimp suit and fur coat ( costumes by Jeff Jones ) —an all-out brawl ensues involving God, Jesus, Satan, Mary and their followers. In the end, Springer reminds all that good and evil are eternal and necessary polarities.
Jerry Springer—The Opera is a tumultuous, musically difficult bear of a show melding musical theater with blasphemous satirical pageantry. Director David Zaks, musical director Gary Powell and choreographer Brenda Didier have tamed the bear and made it sing and dance a fine tune.
Scenic designer Ryan Trupp easily makes Bailiwicks garage-like space look like Springer's warehouse TV set, essentially providing an empty stage for the large cast. Didier, queen of Belmont Avenue musicals, again makes a non-dancing cast look sharp by honing simple steps in well-ordered lines, and extracts a tap ensemble, too. Powell's orchestra is bright with brasses and burnished with woodwinds, and Powell has finely honed his young singers from falsetto pianissimos to tight-harmony quartets to contrapuntal choruses. Particularly outstanding are baritone Jeremy Rill as Warm-Up Man/Satan, mezzos Jenna Cramer and Shannon Strodel as Valkyrie and Gloomy Nurse ( after Jerry is shot—oh, did I say he's shot? ) and spinto tenor Joe Takarz as Cheating Fiancé/God. Steady, sardonic Brian Simmons anchors it all as Jerry Springer, the only non-singing role.
Jammed with musical moments and story incidents, Jerry Springer—The Opera is a whopping theatrical bang for the buck.