An opera about the controversial American chat show host Jerry Springer has become the hot ticket at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Allan Brown explains why.

The Fringe is used to comedy shows selling themselves by using celebrity names opportunistically shoe-horned into the title. Stand-up comedy is clever enough to know a familiar name always stands out amid the tumult of Edinburgh in August. Jerry Springer: The Opera, however, marks a quantum leap in the ambitions of the cheap and cheerful Fringe: a full-blown grand-cum-comic opera with libretto, chorus and cast of 21, most of them swearing repeatedly. Just as there is no art form more stately and baroque than opera, there is no television programme happier to plumb the depths of tornado-belt America than Springer’s. The gladiatorial talk show may now be past its prime, its parade of feuding dysfunctional families and exhibitionist maniacs of pre-9/11, but it lives forever in infancy as the very essence of low-brow, freak-show vulgarity.

It occurred to the show’s writers, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, that grand opera was not entirely dissimilar, though both are willing to admit that their expertise in the field is laughably limited. Hence Jerry Springer: The Opera.

It makes a change from some disaffected Oxbridge graduate in a damp Cowgate cellar vending quips about Richard and Judy. Not that Thomas and Lee necessarily planned it that way. Much like a typical edition of the American talk show host’s confrontational programme, wherein angry transsexuals berate their abusive foot-fetishist step-fathers, the concept of a Springer opera assumed its own wayward, reckless momentum, starting life as a one-man skit performed at the piano before ballooning to its present scale.

“The irony is that the opera fraternity are always dreaming up ways to popularise opera and remove it from its high-art ghetto,” Lee says. “Then two novices come along and seem to do it accidentally.”

The ENO and the Royal Academy of Music both opine that JSTO sounds terribly jolly and a Good Thing if it brings opera to a new audience. Richard Underwood, head of vocal studies at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, agrees: “If we were having this conversation in Italy, we wouldn’t be talking about high culture and low culture,” he says. “You wouldn’t be in the presence of an elite doing their homework. If this show focuses on the salacious tabloid aspect, we can think it a traditional Fringe gimmick. If it honestly aspires to opera then it will get to the heart of human circumstance and see what makes these people tick.”

Thomas and Lee think it does. “The thing about the people on Springer,” Thomas says, “is that their dilemmas are so huge and all-consuming that they border on those we associate with grand opera.”

JSTO, however, is not what purists would recognise as unalloyed opera. In the second half, when Springer goes to hell and mediates acrimonious encounters between various warring figures from history, the score cherrypicks its musical styles from calypso, rock and reggae. The creators’ commitment to the form is not absolute.

While Thomas became addicted to Springer after invariably encountering it returning home drunk from gigs, Lee has barely seen it and doesn’t approve of its insidious manipulations.

Neither previously had any particular interest in opera though Lee saw a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as research. “When we were preparing the show in workshops,” he says, “we invited suggestions from the audience. The more musically minded were amazed at some of the technical things we’d done. But of course, we didn’t know what we were doing, so we didn’t know that certain things weren’t done.”

So, rather than a serious, full-blown attempt to transplant the squalid, fractious concerns of the Springer show into a new and ennobling context, Thomas and Lee prefer to toy with them lightly. So what makes JSTO anything more ambitious creatively than the average musical revue?

“I don’t really care what the purists think,” says Thomas. “They should get out more. Annoyingly, they’ve been really behind the show, though I think they’re so keen to be acknowledged outside their own subsidised circles that they’d support anything even vaguely connected.”

“The thing with high-culture people,” says Lee, “is that they generally have no idea what is going on. Musical theatre is fulled with gags that proper comedians wouldn’t bother making because they’re so lame. The show that Ben Elton wrote with Queen is a perfect example. He must think back to what he used to do and wonder how he ended up like this.

“With Springer, we could get excited about the reception it’s getting from the opera establishment. But then you remember the fuss around the Patrick Marber play Closer, which anyone could see was an episode of This Life put on a stage. Because it had computers in it, the theatrical buffs thought it was the most cutting-edge thing they’d ever seen.

“So we wouldn’t be so crass as to say this is a proper opera about Jerry Springer. It’s a show that points up the operatic elements in the typical Springer encounted and by extension that whole confessional television world. If opera buffs want to claim it as theirs, then let them stew in their own juice.”

The ambition, then, lies not in the embrace of a forbidding and exotic form but in the willingness Thomas and Lee have shown in allowing their humble skit to germinate, merely because they find amusing the idea of trained singers wrapping their fruity contraltos around a welter of expletives.

It began as a sketch performed by Thomas, a Fringe veteran and musical director of Frank Skinner’s various television shows, entitled How to Write an Opera about Jerry Springer. Tom Morris, director of the Battersea Arts Centre, invited him to expand it in a series of workshops.

The arrival of Lee and the financial backing of the powerful Avalon agency ensured a run at the Assembly Rooms and an impressive clutter of West End backroom staff, including arranger Martin Koch, from Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, and designer Julian Crouch, winner this year of an Olivier award. The London performances were attended by Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with talk of a probable run in the West End. But the creators elected first to test the show in Edinburgh.

“I didn’t go to Edinburgh last year,” says Lee. “It had become a trade fair for comedians with very polished acts. Although this show is grand and elaborate it feels more in keeping with what the Fringe used to be. It’s experimental, we’re still not really sure what we’re doing with it. We’ve had to defend this show every step of the way, against people who say it’s insulting to proper opera or who think that Springer’s too low-brow.”

Jerry Springer The Opera

Springer himself has promised to attend one of the performances in Edinburgh, but Lee suspects that privately his attitude is more ambivalent. Springer’s representatives inspected the script and asked that much of the swearing and several religious references be excised, “which, given the nature of the show, is a farcical demand”, Thomas notes. “We could have written it about a made-up figure,” says Lee, “and called it Talk Show: The Opera. But the interesting thing about Springer is that he’s the consummate politician. When we met him, fans came up and he was charm itself. When they left, he said that anyone who enjoyed rubbish like the TV programme were stupid, that the whole thing was vulgar. I think lots of people feel that way about the guests on Springer: they want to look away but they can’t.”

In the end, Thomas and Lee refused to make the changes but the feared legal intervention of Springer’s lawyers didn’t come.

“His whole show exists on a freedom of speech platform,” says Lee. “So it was hypocritical of his people to interfere with us. My own feeling is that Springer told them to back-pedal. He knows he’ll come out of the thing smelling of roses. He’ll be seen to have upheld freedom of expression and, because there’s been an opera written about him in Britain, he’ll be seen back home as a moral philosopher.”