Then Jerry gets shot (don't ask) and, as he bleeds into his Brooks Brothers shirt, hallucination ensues. First there's Purgatory, with its chorus of ghoulish nurses warbling otherworldly comfort. Then Satan shows up and, borrowing pages from Milton and Dante as well as Blake, drags our hero (via elevator) to the flame-licked Basement of the Earth, where the Prince of Darkness hopes to use the Springer format to elicit an apology from Heaven. Eerily resembling the guests of the first act are Jesus in a spangled diaper, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, and, eventually, the Big Kahuna Himself, delivering the Kermit-inspired "It Ain't Easy Being Me." It's this half of the proceedings, though it ingeniously fuses Blake's invocation that "everything that lives is holy" with Springer's admonition to "take care of yourselves and each other," that has the Christians swatting and snarling like, well, Jerry Springer guests.
Paul Daigneault's staging would be even funnier if it were perfectly precise, and not all of the singers are up to the demands of the more dissonant operatic material. Among those who are there's Luke Grooms, as cheating schlep Dwight, infusing the banal lyric "I've been seeing someone else" with the fervency of a prayer, and Ariana Valdes, in the guise of Diaper Man's Miss Muffety playmate Baby Jane, applying a lush soprano to "This Is My Jerry Springer Moment." It's at times like these that you understand the show's larger ambition to fuse the lurid, attention-seeking behavior of the characters with the heft and soul of the music. Whether or not that's achieved, Jerry Springer: The Opera should elicit laugh-laden bravos from the cheap seats, as well as mine.
