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Jerry Springer: The OperaJerry Springer: The Opera

CBS NEWS Posted on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002

The line of cold, anxious performers stretches around the corner of a theater in London’s famed West End. Making up and warming up, nearly 100 hopefuls are here to try out for a production to be staged next season at Britain’s prestigious National Theater.

It’s to be an opera, reports CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth on The Early Show. But it won’t be Carmen.

It’s Jerry. The Jerry Springer show, famous for its lurid life stories and its loutish audience, is coming to the London stage, transformed, as “Jerry Springer – The Opera.” The artistic potential in this story was irresistible, according to composer Richard Thomas.

“Eight people screaming at each other, the audience screaming at the eight people screaming, and I suddenly thought this is a gift as an opera, I thought, imagine that just sung,” says Thomas.

The hopefuls here haven’t seen the opera’s libretto or score; they were just told to sing a few seconds of their best.

Thomas says he’s looking for offbeat talent.

“Opera is a great medium for extremes, and it will soak up any extreme. Most operas are about murder, death, rape, incest — so its not, there’s no point in using opera unless you are going to have a very extreme subject,” he explains.

And if you’re thinking opera is not opera if it is not Verdi or Puccini, the National Theater thinks you’re wrong.

“And people often make the mistake of confusing the subject of a material of a thing with whether it’s art whereas really what makes something good is how you handle that material, how you treat it and I think we’ve treated it with respect and also a sense of humor,” says first time director and co-writer Stewart Lee.

A tenor’s already been hired, though right now he’s working as a department store clothing salesman. The rest of the cast will be picked this month.

The opera opens in April 2003 at the Lyttelton Theatre and it won’t be over , obviously, until the jilted-wife-who-became-a-homewrecker-and-couldn’t-stop-cheating-on-her-lazy-boyfriend sings.

Tickets will be on sale early in the New Year.

The opera began its development as a public “scratch night” at The Battersea Arts Centre in 2001, funded by Thomas. It was developed through a subsequent series of public workshops which were seen by Nicholas Hytner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh and various Broadway producers and went on to be performed in concert at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer.

No one on the creative team, which includes first time director and co-writer Stewart Lee, has worked at the National Theatre before. It is both Thomas’ and the National Theatre’s first new opera.

In this production the National Theatre team, led by Nicholas Hytner, will collaborate with Allan McKeown (original producer of “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet”) and comedy producer Avalon (“The Frank Skinner Show,” “Fantasy Football,” “The All New Harry Hill Show”).

CBS NEWS on 10th December 2002. Filed Under: Interview, Jerry Springer: The Opera
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