Jerry

I will probably have more to say about this later, but just now I'm still gently simmering and can only be bothered with the bottom line: Jerry Springer the Opera is cack.

[Later]

Not everything about this show is terrible. If it were trimmed to about a twentieth of its length it might have made an entertaining skit on Attention Scum! It has a couple of good ideas, but they are spun out so far beyond their capacity to sustain any interest that the light from there takes 20 minutes to arrive -- and then buried beneath a much greater weight of really bad ideas.

The good ideas are these: (i) to do a show in which the trailer trash tabloid aesthetic of Jerry Springer is translated into a high art format; (ii) the tap dancing Klansmen at the end of Act I; (iii) that Jerry be whisked off to Hell to sort out the dysfunctional relationships of the major figures in Judaeo-Christian mythology. Each of these is certainly worth a couple of minutes of airtime.

The crucial bad ideas are: (i) that tuneless shrieking and warbling is opera, or indeed anything worth seeing or hearing; (ii) that "fuck" is an unfailingly hilarious lyric; (iii) that anything vaguely blasphemous is automatically morally complex and sophisticated.

Of these, the first is far and away the show's biggest problem. The music is uniformly dreadful, and the cast sing it badly.

As to the others: you should fucking know by fucking now that I have no fucking problem with fucking swearing. Swearing is big and it is clever. It can be hilarious when done well -- the South Park movie (to which Jerry Springer the Opera bears some superficial resemblances) springs to mind. And there's no denying it sells. If the success of this show (and the rather better Mother Clap's Molly House) proves anything, it's that NT audiences have an almost limitless appetite for the word cunt.

As far as blasphemy goes, I say: bring it on. My opinions on religion are well-documented, and anything that exposes its raging stupidity is fine by me.

But.

It's not as easy as that. For swearing and blasphemy to work well onstage -- at least, for more than a couple of minutes of tittering -- they have to have some direction, some underlying intelligence to give them satirical power. Jerry Springer the Opera has none. The whole thing feels like it was concocted one night in the pub after a few too many drinks. It's a senseless mish-mash. It is, as I said back at the start, cack.

And it's boring cack. It's mind-numbingly tiresome. For a show full of transsexuals, fat crack whores, murderers, hillbillies and -- for fuck's sake! -- Satan, this is unforgivable. It drags on and on and fucking on. And even when it's all over, there's more: a finale reprises every single pathetic excuse for a song in the show. Which isn't actually very many -- the material is unbelievably thin -- but still too fucking many.

According to the programme notes, one of the rules of Kombat Opera is:

(words to that effect, anyway, I don't have the programme to hand). I guess the NT weren't willing to stage a three minute show, which is a shame: at that length Jerry Springer the Opera would probably have been great fun. At two hours it is a total fucking waste of time.
Posted by matt at January 15, 2004 10:52 PM