Springer's surprise

Surely no more blasphemous, vulgar or salacious piece of musical theatre than Jerry Springer - The Opera has graced the London stage in modern times. I never dreamed I would one day watch a scene set in hell, where a near nude Jesus admits to being "a bit gay", squares up to Satan in a baroque duet, and a plump, silver-belted Almighty (Benjamin Lake) descends on a gold swing singing It Ain't Easy Bein' Me.

Yet what a dazzling night of serious amusement and provocation, of mock-heroic, operatic pastiche, of religious and social satire Jerry Springer - The Opera offers to those whose religious convictions can survive a little battering.

This musical burlesque, inspired by American TV's weirdest confessional chat show, is an utterly inspired feat of originality, both in musical and theatrical terms.

Premiered at the Battersea Arts Centre and revised for the Edinburgh Festigrandval Fringe in 2002, Jerry Springer - The Opera, music by Richard Thomas who cowrote the witty book and lyrics with Stewart Lee, arrives in town dramatically improved.

In Lee's own production, singers and chorus are in fine harmony with the little orchestra. The second act, with Jerry's show televised from hell, and Jesus "who has fallen a long way to be here", a principal confessor, works miracles - literally.

Thomas and Lee have hit upon the sensible idea that the confessional form of Jerry Springer's talk show resembles the plots and arias of romantic and baroque opera. Their own, slightly anti-Catholic musical invites you to consider whether confession has become a destructive, absurd mass media process. When the authors subject sacred religious figures to the Springer technique, they surely jolt us into realising how debased the confessional process has become.

Thomas has composed majestic numbers, which variously sound as if originating from the past three centuries. Here is music of operatic grandeur, of erotic longings and languishings, placed at the service of Springer's sex-freaks who sing scatalogical lyrics about whores, crack, junkies, sluts, nipples and other unmentionable things. What fresh, comic pleasure is stirred when these low soap opera lives are given the distinction of high opera music whose elevated sounds clash with the disreputable libretto.

The scene is Jerry's television studio. A freakish-looking audience serves as a frenzied chorus. Michael Brandon's shameless Jerry sounds just like Woody Allen. First guest, Benjamin Lake's Dwight, is torn between two women and a transsexual who sings of the mixed blessings of "a chick with a dick with a heart". A young man wants nothing more than to slip into nappies and discover odd bliss - "I wanna be your baby, baby." Then when Jerry is wounded by a bullet intended for a chorus of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klanners, his warm-up man, the charismatic David Bedella, becomes transformed into the Devil himself.

The musical changes tack. Sacred figure, Wills Morgan's Jesus, the Almighty, Adam and Eve and Valda Avik's glum Mary are all reduced to the status of confessional guests on Jerry's hell-centred show. The music and libretto, full of Bach and Handelian flourishes, reach fresh heights of comic, bad-taste mockery as humanism usurps religion: utter, impure theatrical pleasure.

Jerry Springer - The Opera