Triumph, Tragedy & Trailer Trash as
High Culture Meets Low Culture

(Please note, Jerry Springer is now played by David Soul and the nowt2do.com award winning actor David Bedella has now returned to play Satan)

“The West End Needs Springer”
(Nicholas De Jongh Evening Standard, August 20^th 2002) 
…The West End Gets Springer

Jerry Springer - The Opera, which has transferred to the London’s Cambridge Theatre, had its West End Premiere on Monday 10^th November. The show is currently the hottest ticket in London. Its National Theatre run was extended twice with black-market tickets selling for £150. Following the unprecedented rave reviews and standing ovations from critics and public alike, original producers Avalon Promotions and Allan McKeown now present the show in the West End. It has been the National Theatre’s biggest hit in years and is the first-ever original musical to transfer from the National Theatre in its 41 years since founding.

The opera began its development in a series of public ‘Scratch Nights’ at Battersea Arts Centre in 2001 with Richard Thomas (music, book and lyrics) and Stewart Lee (book and lyrics). The show continued its development and went on to be performed in concert at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2002 before the World Premiere at the National Theatre on April 29^th 2003. The show will now become a £3million commercial production with the largest cast ever seen at The Cambridge Theatre

Jerry Springer – The Opera is a collaboration between Avalon (The Frank Skinner Show, Fantasy Football and The All New Harry Hill Show), Allan McKeown (Emmy Award winning TV producer and original producer of Auf Wiedersehen Pet. Founder of SelecTV and Meridian), the National Theatre and BAC.

    “I only wish I’d thought of it first…”

(Jerry Springer)          

Please remember that the show is NOT suitable for children.

Jerry Springer – The Opera is a new opera based on America’s most lurid talk show and the US host who brought worldwide television audiences programmes entitled: “Pregnant by a Transsexual,” “Here Come the Hookers,” and “I Refuse to Wear Clothes”. As Richard Thomas (music, book and lyrics) said of the television show: “It’s got tragedy.  It’s got violence.  There are people screaming at each other and you can’t understand what they’re saying.  It’s perfect for opera.”  

What the press has said so far

“This is the most explosive theatrical event for years, and the biggest thrill at the National for decades. Jerry Springer – The Opera crashed through barrier after barrier of taste and expectation with every foul-mouthed inventive, sublimely sung note…The enunciation is perfect, the phrasing is precise, the tones are bell-like. ‘Three nipple cousin-fucker’ rings round the auditorium like a hallelujah… the show sets a new standard for musical theatre…It’s also a comment on high art: it turns out that opera is the perfect vehicle for melodramatic exchanges in which people are so busy bellowing they can’t hear each other scream…Two years ago, I saw a version of the show at BAC: it was transfixing. But the expanded version is even richer: the ambitious creators have grown to match the greater length and bigger space. The show now has a darker dimension…The National will never be the same again. Praise be. To Jerry.”
Susannah Clapp, The Observer

“Jerry Springer – The Opera is something else entirely. This is a bruising, shocking, irresistibly funny masterpiece all on its own; a big, boisterous, brazenly scabrous – nay, raucously filthy – morality play…It makes no secret of the fact that it mocks the meat it feeds on: it even invites you to join the feast… Richard Thomas’s score is a brilliant patch work of musical pastiche…the score conveys operatic magnificence and deep feeling that surround and sanctify the contents like an ornate gilt frame surrounding a pair of soiled underpants in an avant-garde art gallery… …Jerry Springer – The Opera will be a huge success…It is both intelligent, superbly choreographed and utterly hilarious entertainment.”
John Peter, The Sunday Times

“La Boheme was never like this. More than two decades after the British musical ‘explosion’ began with Andrew Lloyd Webber, only to trickle away to near-nothingness in the years since, along comes composer Richard Thomas…with quite simply the most sophisticated and exciting through-sung score I have encountered in my 19 years in London.”
Matt Wolf, Variety

“Jerry Springer - the Opera, the surprise London hit based on the crude, rude and socially unacceptable American talk show, is by all accounts the most sought-after show in the world right now." 
Jesse McKinley, New York Times

“The ear-splitting cheers which greeted the opening of this show were the stuff of a pop concert… Their voices soar to music as sublime, glorious and divine as a sacred choral mass, but the libretto is more like graffiti on the wall of a public loo… There’s nothing more entertaining to be seen anywhere.
Georgina Brown, Mail on Sunday

 “Audacious, blasphemous, venomous, scandalous and fabulous.”
Mark Shenton, Sunday Express

“People near me were ecstatically joining in yells of “Jerry Jerry” in imitation of their television counterparts. If ever a show seems destined for cult status this is it…It’s a musical mock-heroic – and a lot funnier than most of its literary prototypes…It’s gloriously spot on.”
Benedict Nightingale, The Times

“It’s filthy, it’s funny, it’s brilliantly original and, taken all in all, about as much fun as you are likely to have with your clothes on…It seems to me a stroke of genius by the composer Richard Thomas to turn this hideously addictive reflection of our age into an opera, and this is real opera, full of beautifully sung arias and duets with a huge full-throated chorus who sing the word Jerry as if it were Kyrie…The effect is genuinely funny, genuinely shocking and if you are easily offended this is not the show for you. Those with open minds and adventurous hearts will love it…I never thought I would find a man who wants to poo his pants touching but somehow, in this gaudy context it is…The company is excellent…The National Theatre has a thrilling, truly ground breaking hit on its hands and both the West End, and Broadway must surely beckon.”
Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph

“A major event of theatre: uproarious, astonishing, and, in the seriousness of it’s irony, utterly disarming.”
Alaistair McCauley, Financial Times

“For originality I have no hesitation in declaring Jerry Springer – The Opera to be the greatest production on earth…and in hell…two hours and 20 minutes of sheer theatrical bliss…I have not a bad thing to say about this marvelous mickey-take of the operatic genre. It works so well because the cast all sing with Wagnerian voices…This is the ultimate Jerry Springer moment. It’s wild, crazy and fearlessly irreverent…Any theatre fan who misses this goes straight to hell.”
Kevin O’Sullivan, Daily Mirror

“Surely no more blasphemous, vulgar or salacious piece of musical theatre than Jerry Springer – The Opera has graced the London stage in modern times…Yet, what a dazzling night of serious amusement and provocation of mock-heroic, operatic pastiche of religious and social satire…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…Thomas has composed grand, majestic numbers, which variously sound as if originating from the past three centuries…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…Bach and Handelian flourishes, reach fresh heights of comic bad-taste mockery as humanism usurps religion: utter, impure theatrical pleasure.“
Nicholas De Jongh, Evening Standard

“The most arresting, hilarious and original pieces of modern musical theatre ever to be seen…It’s this year’s hot ticket.”
Warwick Thomspon, Metro

 “Liam Gallagher went to see it, then returned two days later with 15 mates…it’s the strangest, funniest live show I’ve ever seen.”
Sean Hamilton, Daily Star

“The cult of ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ has finally been usurped.”
Jane Edwardes, Time Out

“Reviewing an already acclaimed show is a bit like arriving sober at a party where everyone else is drunk.  But everything one has heard about this show in its previous incarnations at Battersea and Edinburgh turns out to be true: it is lewd, rude and outrageous and yet manages to turn trash TV into something musically sophisticated.”
Michael Billington, The Guardian

Buy tickets for events:

Sponsors