RUDE AWAKENING
Infamous talk show sings out off-B’way
OPERA lovers may think they’ve heard it all, from the screams of Don Juan burning in hell to Brünnhilde’s cries of triumph to the coughs of countless women keeling over from consumption. Chances are they’ve yet to hear a chorus belting “Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!” — or an aria such as “Chick With a Dick.”
They can hear it now. “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” which opened off-Broadway on Thursday, is a curse-clogged, crude, calamitous adaptation of the TV talk show, set to music.
And as crazy as the concept seems, one of its two co-writers knew that opera and “Springer” would click the instant he first saw the talk show late one night back in the ’90s.
“There were about eight people screaming at each other,” Richard Thomas tells The Post. “It was all being bleeped out. You couldn’t understand a word of what was being said. And I thought, ‘Wow! This is like an opera!’ ”
After his naughty idea was born, Thomas watched at least two episodes of the show per day at his home in London, where it was syndicated, for six months. That binge taught him something profound, Thomas says: People may talk trash, but they’re also human.
“I was genuinely moved,” he says. “And horrified and also slightly ashamed of myself for being complicit in this voyeuristic contract between myself and the participants.”
Thomas, a composer and former comedian, co-wrote the show’s script and also wrote its score, a mix of opera, pop, blues and musical theater.
An earlier, one-act incarnation first premiered in 2000, and three years later the full-length opera became a hit for London’s National Theatre. While a two-day concert version of it played at Carnegie Hall in 2008, the New Group is giving it a full staging, albeit, in a more intimate environment.
“It’s like you’re in the studio,” Thomas says of the 230-seat Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center. “The whole stage and the aisle are used,” so audiences will be just a few feet away from the cast, which includes Broadway veterans Terrence Mann (“Beauty and the Beast”), who plays Springer, and Will Swenson.
When the BBC aired “Jerry Springer: The Opera” in 2005, more than 60,000 angry viewers called in to complain. And a few months prior, British tabloids had gone so far as to tally up its number of swearwords, with the Daily Mail claiming a Hail Maryinducing 8,000.
“Of course there were nowhere near 8,000 swearwords,” Thomas says. “I think it’s like 174. They claimed it was the number of swearwords [multiplied by] the number of people actually singing them, which is a bit cheeky.”
So what does Springer think of it? In 2003, the talkshow host saw the show in London: a meta moment.
“I thought they did a really good job,” Springer, now 74, told pop-culture Web site the A.V. Club. “It was awkward for me to watch it. For one, it’s about yourself, so there’s no common experience. There’s no one I can ask, ‘Gee, how did you feel?’ I can’t call Figaro or Carmen and say, ‘Hey, how did you feel about your opera?’ ”