Review: 'Springer' a white elephant of a show

NEW YORK - Jerry Springer - The Opera was bound to be some sort of landmark at its New York premiere on Tuesday, but what unfolded only damns it with faint notoriety: Never, I am sure, has such nasty language been unleashed on the stage of the 116-year-old hall, even by bad-tempered divas and exasperated stagehands.

Was anybody surprised? Doubt it. The audience appeared to be either serious Springer fans who know the words behind the show's televised bleeps, or theater folk who know the show's reputation from its hit years - London starting in 2003 and U.S. productions in Chicago and Memphis. The two-night Carnegie run starring Harvey Keitel as Springer is a showcase to spur something similar on Broadway.

My guess: It won't happen. Though an accomplished, entertaining, musically sophisticated and dramatically uncompromising look at American culture at its freakiest, the opera (and it is an opera, more than Les Miserables) is the victim of its own ambition and passing fads.

Its real-life subject peaked years ago. Though opera is rarely concerned with being current, this one needs marketing momentum to override the risk that comes with a large, 33-member cast and the static that's bound to greet this gleefully irreverent tour of America's dark heart. It's a white elephant, though an elephant, indeed, as opposed to a cheap-shot parody.

The two-act piece begins with a freakier-than-usual day in the life of the Springer show, closing Act I with a tap-dancing tribe of Ku Klux Klansmen. Act II finds Jerry in Hell with a guest roster - Satan, Jesus, Adam and Eve, God the Father - that reveals the hobbled psyches behind the violence of Act I.

The incredibly adept Richard Thomas score touches on all manner of American pop song genres, not in songs so much as in fragments deployed to make vivid dramatic points while maintaining a hectic, Springer-like pace. The best comparison is Jeanine Tesori's Caroline, or Change score, though Thomas is more inclined to stretch out and create a traditional showstopper when the contour of the show demands it.

The primary sin in Springerland, it seems, isn't the exploitation of the emotionally damaged, or the rampant lack of on-camera impulse control, but the pretense that such TV does anybody any good. In saying this, the opera is obliged to divest itself of its own pretention: The central character neither deserves scapegoating or his own opera. "I don't solve problems," says Springer. "I televise them."

The fact that Springer never sings also makes him a cipher of the problem, not the problem itself. Opera hopes to be more than what meets the eye. This one admits it's less than it seems.

Maybe you wouldn't mind if Keitel, a good idea for the title role, had been firing on all cylinders. He wasn't, which is a problem, even with David Bedella reprising his West End success as Springer's demonic assistant, and a cast featuring Broadway veteran Emily Skinner.

Ultimately, Springer becomes symbolic of something bigger, of great ideas that fail to expand into meaningful ones.