The Jerry Springer TV show never rates more than a glance from me while flipping channels. It gives me a sick-to-the-stomache feeling to see him abusing and using people for his own ends. But the British have made a musical about it, and Ben Brantley has written a glowing review published today in the New York Times.

Read it here: 'Jerry Springer,’ the Great American Musical

or peruse these few snippets from the article:

it opened Tuesday night in a gorgeously sung concert version at Carnegie Hall for a sinfully short run of two performances.

But this remarkable work —which features a spectacularly inventive score by Richard Thomas, with a book and lyrics by Mr. Thomas and Stewart Lee — uncovers something grand within the small...

...it hears genuine beauty in the hunger for glory of the attention-starved souls it portrays.

If the real “Jerry Springer Show” turns its rowdy, angry guests into objects of sneering sport, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” sees them as figures of passion, whose impulses, however base, translate into song that reaches for the stars.

But it’s the second act, which takes Jerry straight to hell to arbitrate a debate between Jesus and the Devil, that has raised hackles high.


...what is truly shocking about “Jerry Springer: The Opera”: an all-embracing empathy that finds the sublime in the squalid and vice versa. Mr. Thomas’s score — which blends, among other elements, Baroque oratorio, Gershwin-esque gospel and Samuel Barber-esque arias — unfailingly lends grandeur to lives contemptuously dismissed...

The opera contains an empathy that without doubt Jesus would have shared.