Jerry Springer: The Opera

[spoilers throughout]

Yes, curse words sung operatically by incredibly talented people are startlingly funny. And arguments about who's cheating on who, complete with hair-pulling, are also great fun presented operatically. But they have diminishing returns, and, although I completely was completely enjoying the first act of Jerry Springer: The Opera, I began to wonder if it goes anywhere.

It does: it goes to purgatory, complete with biblical characters (e.g., Satan, Adam, Eve, Jesus). And guess what? They have as many issues as the humans in Act I and behave as badly. And, yes, it's a blast.

I suspect the show wants to provide social commentary, and perhaps it did when it was first written. Now, it mostly provides entertainment--first-class, top-notch, occasionally side-splitting entertainment. And much of the music is beautiful, to boot.

Richard Thomas (music, book, and lyrics) and Stewart Lee (book and lyrics) could not ask for a better production than the one currently being presented by the New Group. John Rando directs the craziness of the show with perfect pacing and mood, and Chris Bailey's choreography is wonderfully character-specific and wonderfully wonderful.

And the cast is full of amazingly talented people who can sing magnificently, act well, and move--and who also have prodigious amounts of energy. They are Jennifer Allen, Florrie Bagel, Brandon Contreras (remarkably poised and effective subbing in two challenging roles), Sean Patrick Doyle, Brad Greer, Luke Grooms, Nathaniel Hackmann, Billy Hepfinger, Beth Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth Loyacano, Terence Mann (a convincingly glib Jerry Springer), Tiffany Mann, Jill Paice, Kim Steele, Will Swenson (a sexy, commanding Satan), and Nichole Turner.

The design components are also top-of-the-line, appropriate, and funny. Scenic design is by Derek McLane; costume design is by Sarah Laux; and lighting design by Jeff Croiter.

One of the strengths of this fabulous production is the small theater in which it is currently appearing. I would imagine that Jerry Springer: The Opera will move to Broadway and will still be marvelous. However, if you can see it in its current incarnation, do so. The show happens all around the audience, and the intimacy is one of its major charms.

Wendy Caster
(press ticket; 4th row on the aisle; shook "Jerry Springer's" hand)

Jerry Springer: The Opera

For all its highbrow associations, there's a hell of a lot of lowbrow to opera, what with all the really dumb cases of mistaken identity, lurid psychotic breaks, incestuous couplings, and lovers' quarrels that end in brutal violence or surprisingly lengthy deaths from tuberculosis. Men who like to wear diapers and act like babies, women who dream of becoming strippers, and transgender pimps with hearts of gold would ultimately fit just as well into the world of opera as they do into the world of Jerry Springer. I guess that's kind of the point of this show.

Richard Thomas's Jerry Springer: The Opera, currently receiving its Off Broadway premiere at the Signature Theater complex courtesy of the New Group, reimagines The Jerry Springer Show (still in syndication! Who knew?) as something more Wagnerian than I'm sure Springer ever intended. As silly as it is sonically lush, the production is engaging, brisk and light, and in the second act even gently moving under the typically deft, never-too-self-important direction of John Rando. The cast is talented and interesting, Terence Mann is hilariously deadpan as Springer, and Will Swenson, who plays jerks very well, is notably well-cast as Satan, the supreme jerk among all jerks. The ensemble, too, is strong to a one, which is good, since this is very much an ensemble piece. I somehow expected Jerry and Satan to have much meatier roles, but there's a lot going on that does not always involve either one of them. In brief, and perhaps somewhat snobbishly, I would happily sit through this production again, whereas the thought of watching a few minutes of the real Jerry Springer Show makes the comparable thought of rolling around naked in ground glass just a titch more inviting.

The only issue I have with Jerry Springer: The Opera, really, is that for its groovy conceit--opera Jerry gets shot and, in purgatory, learns that Jesus, Mary, God and Satan are all as whiny, crazy, argumentative and flawed as his television guests are--there's ultimatlely not much more to it. Which is, I suppose, just fine: sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar, a well-performed opera is just a well-performed opera, and a crossdressing sex-addicted trucker who likes to be spanked is just a crossdressing sex-addicted trucker who likes to be spanked.

Maybe, more specifically, it's the marketing for this particular production that doesn't fully jibe for me. The New Group's web-page copy insists that Jerry Springer: The Opera is "deeply in tune with the chaos and unrestrained id of our times," and that may be the case, but frankly, the opera seems postively quaint considering how low the bar has fallen and how much of what used to raise eyebrows on Springer has within mere decades become just another astoundingly sad news day. There's nothing at all wrong with the production. It's just kind of a bummer to realize how much of its content is rooted in a more innocent time--a time when the very basest of human behavior was relatively contained to a few afternoon talk shows. How newly foreign it is to realize that Jerry Springer: The Opera, so sweet and ultimately tame, actually caused enough of an uproar to spark boycotts that made the national news.

Much more than a nostalgia trip, Jerry Springer: The Opera nevertheless harkens back to a recently bygone era of slow news days. Maybe we'll get back to that point someday; in the meantime, I guess, we'll always have JERRY! JERRY! JERRRR-Y!!
 

Pippin

Photo: Michael J. Lutch

 

Allow me to cut right to the chase: Diane Paulus's revival of Pippin, which opens Thursday, is sublime. At the risk of sounding cliched, there are just not enough superlatives to describe how excellent, brilliant, wonderful, warm, engaging, astonishing, entertaining and just plain delicious it is. I might need to start making adjectives up for this one. It's been a long time since I saw a show that was so tightly directed, so gleefully and brilliantly performed, so genuinely and ecstatically received by its audience--so very, very good.

Some of this is, of course, the source material. Pippin is a great show, if also a quirky one. It has a consistently strong, memorable score that was released on Motown Records, and that most people of my generation thus grew up listening to and loving, even if most of us never saw the show or knew what it was about. It had an innovative, fringe-influenced book that reflects the darkening moods and growing inwardness of the 1970s and yet refuses to relinquish the dogged optimism and communal spirit of the 1960s. It has been indelibly marked by the brilliant and complicated Bob Fosse, whose trademark jazz hands, bowler hats, swiveling pelvises, and skin-tight costumes helped make the original Broadway production a huge hit that practically bellowed his name at every turn. Fosse's shadow looms so large, in fact, that it's no wonder the show hasn't been revived on Broadway before. I can imagine that the task was daunting, but Diane Paulus's production manages to keep the show squarely in Fosse territory, and yet to radically reinvent it at the same time.

I've long admired Diane Paulus's productions. She strikes me as the best kind of postmodernist: she regularly tries to to simultaneously reinvent and pay homage, to wildly different ends. The Donkey Show was not only hilarious and weird and unlike anything I'd ever seen, but it also tapped directly into the Off Off Broadway experimentalism that was hot during the 1960s, and that she has long been influenced by: theater as communal celebration and ritual, theater as sociopolitical commentary, theater as a bonding force between performer and spectator. I loved it, and remember it fondly as another high point in my life as a theatergoer. Yet some of her more recent productions haven't quite managed the same kind of delicate balance. Don't get me wrong: I saw her revival of Hair twice. But I've studied the original production a great deal, and aside from a slight shift away from its more aggressively masculine tone, I was never convinced that her revival was so terribly radical a departure. Similarly, for all the hype around her Porgy and Bess, I wasn't convinced that the changes Stephen Sondheim got all pissy about were all that big a deal in performance, either.

But her Pippin nails the landing, and then some. As noted, purists need not fret: The show remains strongly committed to Fosse, to whom it pays homage in multiple ways: the costumes, the postures, the dances, the splayed fingers, the leering faces, the bobbling pelvises, even much of the casting.

Yet at the same time, Paulus modernizes the production with a number of choices that threaten to come off as gimmicky or superficial, but never, ever do. Set in a circus bigtop, and featuring players drawn from the Montreal-based troupe, Les 7 Doigts de la Main, this Pippin has a strongman, trapeze artists, contortionists, jugglers, acrobats, and guys who balance on impossibly precarious contraptions for our viewing pleasure. On the surface, this all sounds perfectly nice, but what it does in performance is drive home Fosse's fascination with powerful, twisting, sensual bodies, while dazzling audiences in brand new ways.

Casting Patina Miller in the role of the Leading Player--a character that Ben Vereen has pretty much trademarked--also sounds a little gimmicky: "Oh, a female Leading Player? Cool, whatever." But again, in performance, the choice shifts the dynamic dramatically: the supportive, headstrong, ultimately petulant Leading Player is as sharp and sexy and sneering as Vereen was, but now also touches, in the most subtle and fleeting of ways, on just about every aspect of contemporary feminist philosophy. And she totally rocks her jaunty, frighteningly angular bowler hat.

Then there's the rest of the company. Terrence Mann is perfectly cast, and perfectly pitched, as Charles, Pippin's goofily distracted, blithely bloodthirsty father. Mann's rendition of "War Is a Science," with its slipping, speeding tempos, made sense to me for the first time, ever; it and "Glory" do well, also, to carefully reflect what is eerily seductive--beautiful, even--about blood and gore and violent death. Mann can ride a unicycle, to boot--who knew? Charlotte D'Amboise plays up the ridiculous stereotype that is Fastrada, while dancing up a storm. Rachel Bay Jones adds nuance, dimension, and a touch of pain to the bubbly Catherine in the show's quieter and yet endlessly compelling second act. And Matthew James Thomas is a winning, scruffy Pippin, whose desperate search for meaning sets him off from the rest of the ensemble. Thomas is not as intensely physical as the rest of the cast, which works, surprisingly, to the show's advantage: as a lost everyman, his Pippin is just as blown away as we are by the taut, beautiful, powerful bodies surrounding him.

And then there's Andrea Martin, whose Berthe brings the house down with an absolutely brilliant blend of grandmotherly warmth and matronly bite. It's a rare, beautiful thing to see a single performer so thoroughly charm an enormous audience as quickly as she does here. I remember once seeing Neil Young address a screaming arena of thousands by grunting "hey," at them, as if they were all hanging out in his living room with him, languidly sipping cheap, lukewarm beer. Martin can do this too, and it's awesome. Within moments of "No Time at All," she had the entire house singing along with her--loudly and happily--as the lyrics were projected onto the backdrop. The communal spirit she musters in this scene is, again, a nod to Paulus' admiration of the 1960s Off Off Broadway scene: I suspect that if Martin had asked us to run out into the street and take our clothes off, we totally might've. But then, the stunts Martin accomplishes on the trapeze later in the scene--and no, I'm not joking--are something fresh, new, and unbelievably wonderful.

Which makes sense, really, since all the superlatives I've ended up using in this writeup apply to every single minute of this fresh, new, unbelievably wonderful revival.