To Wedekind's roil of unwilling ignorance and hormonal overflow the Broadway show adds sly humor and musical cri de cœur. The latter is delivered at full, leaping yowl or with folkish supplication by an athletic, pure-voiced young cast led by Kyle Riabko as a probing Melchior, Christy Altomare as scared, sensualist-in-training Wendla, and Lost actor Blake Bashoff as a muscular if muddled and extravagantly Eraserheaded Moritz. The singers are backed by an excellent on-stage band conducted by Jared Stein and set against a brick wall decorated with period portraiture and glaring neon accents. Sheik's spare, Tony-winning orchestrations make winning bedfellows of acoustic guitar, electric bass, classical strings, keyboards, and percussion, and Kevin Adams's dramatic lighting makes a glowing hell of adolescence. Like Desdemona, Spring Awakening is worth getting excited by.
JERRY SPRINGER: From here to eternity — or maybe to Hell in a handbasket. |
How do you exaggerate The Jerry Springer Show? The answer is thoughtfully provided by Jerry Springer: The Opera, the Olivier Award–winning London megahit and protest-spurring sacrilege now in its Boston premiere by SpeakEasy Stage Company (at the Calderwood Pavilion through May 30). First you give TV's long-running combative confessional such a pottymouth that, subject to the FCC, it would be bleeped from here to eternity. Then you take it to eternity, by means of a second act that finds Springer moderating a Blakean smackdown in Hell. Most important, you plug the lowlife losers, cheaters, and perverts that are the show's 15-minutes-of-fame-seeking fodder and turn their profane, pathetic extrusions into the high art of opera, with influences ranging from Bach and Handel to Gershwin (not to mention jazz, funk, and Busby Berkeley). There has never been anything quite like this wild ride on the back of Jerry Springer from composer Richard Thomas and stand-up comic Stewart Lee. And if SpeakEasy Stage Company doesn't clear every hurdle, it stays in the saddle with an extravagant, large-cast production that includes swirling projections, a hand-held video cam, tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen, and something perilously close to an auto-da-fé.
The show begins with a mock variant on a Baroque Passion, except that the somberly expressed lyrics refer to "lesbian dwarfs," "a chick with a dick," and the singers' yearning to be on TV. Following the obligatory warm-up featuring an audience that's part of the cast, some get their chance in guilty-secrets episodes featuring Dwight, who's cheating on fiancée Peaches with her best friend and a transsexual, Montel, who confides to his beloved and millions of viewers his fetishistic desire to wear and soil a diaper, and Shawntel, whose dream of becoming a pole dancer doesn't suit hostile redneck hubby Chucky. When things get physical, security is on hand both to fan and to control the fisticuffs. In other words, absent the operatic element (except for Shear Madness fixture Michael Fennimore's contributions to the melee as the bushy-haired host, the musical is through-sung), it's just like The Jerry Springer Show with Verdi in the sound booth.
