New stage formula

Ever since Richard Eyre fulfilled Laurence Olivier's dream by staging Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in 1982, the venue has been bolstering its finances with splashy revivals of musicals.

Vast casts, orchestras and design demands mean that they're terrifyingly expensive to produce, but success spells boxoffice. Audiences in the past two years booked on the basis of the titles alone for South Pacific and My Fair Lady. But the gulf between remounting a well-loved classic and staging something new is a mile wide. Which is why incoming artistic director Nicholas Hytner's announcement that his reign will kick off in April with Jerry Springer - The Opera is bold and exciting.

Most "new" musicals these days are either back-catalogue shows or pointless retreads of old movies like the technologically impressive, but dramatically lifeless, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Although Jerry Springer - The Opera clearly derives from a TV source, it is far more than a carbon-copy with added songs.

It sprang to life at Battersea Arts Centre in February 2001. Gleeful word-of-mouth for this short, sharp shock of a show spread like wildfire and its creator/composer Richard Thomas began refashioning his seemingly mad, hour-long satirical extravaganza into a fulllength production. It grabbed the headlines at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, commercial producers were panting for it and Springer himself flew in to see it.

By this time, Thomas had been joined by co-writer/director Stewart Lee (one half of comedy duo Lee and Herring). The imminent arrival of Springer induced more than a little panic. After all, their show sees Springer presiding over a blackly comic rewrite of a typically rabble-rousing, warts 'n' all episode, with a voracious chorus of keyed-up audience members, a hymn to pole-dancing, a desperate guest stripping down to nappies and a tap-dancing line of Ku Klux Klansmen and ends the first half by having Jerry killed live on air.

In the second half, things get even hotter as Jerry arrives at Judgment Day and faces a battle between heaven and hell.

The real-life Springer, despite his reputation as a sleaze-fest schlockjock, must be smart: he saw the funny side and granted his permission. He probably welcomed the opportunity to be associated with so singular a show.

Critics were already raving. "Forget your furs, your picnic baskets and your corporate hospitality. This is opera in the raw," cried the Independent on Sunday. " Liberatingly irreverent," declared The Observer, "It would be hard to find a movie to match this for invention and imagination."

The first tip-off of its theatrical savvy is the smart title. Jerry

Springer...an opera? The very incongruity is intriguing. However, within seconds of the musical starting, you realise that high-voltage singing is the best way to dramatise a Springer chat show, with its sordid - usually sexual - confessions by members of the public.

The problem for all musicals is to make it seem natural that characters burst into song, but here, from the opening chorus of "Jer-ry, Jer-ry, Jer-ry ..." which sounds increasingly like a comic version of "Kyrieî from a sung Mass, that thought simply never occurs.