An evening of live theater at 3Below Theater in downtown San José is most often going to provide quirky stories told by professional singers and actors that provide plenty of belly laughs. Making audiences laugh is what they do best.
That’s why I’m already laughing at the very idea and premise behind their newest production, “Jerry Springer: the Opera,” playing through March 17. Their capable and talented crew of singers/actors will no doubt bring a fresh take on what the TV Guide once called “The Worst Show on Television.”
This particular musical was written by British composer and lyricist Richard Thomas, staged locally by 3Below, directed by Scott Guggenheim and choreographed by Shannon Guggenheim.
Ric Iverson, always a fun actor to watch, stars as Springer while the lovely-sounding Guggenheim provides foil and villainy as the devilish page who thwarts the hero.
Jerry Springer always served as a modern morality play, bringing on guests of commedia del’ arte proportions, having committed the sins of cheating and lying and fooling around while we the live audience—represented in the show by a screaming filmed studio audience—shouts out moral pronouncements and suggested punishments.
Just like the real show, 3Below’s operatic rendition is likely to be chaotic, funny and head-scratching at times as the company takes full advantage of runway-style theater that brings the audience into the action.
While the play, set in 2003, begins as a reproduction of this bizarre end-of-the-1900s phenomenon, it quickly veers into the dramatic territory befitting a two-hour sung-through musical: heaven, hell, betrayal and redemption.
Scott Guggenheim said, “Although it is a hugely successful piece that played to rave reviews in London and enjoyed a UK tour, protestors regularly picketed performances over the material.” The material in question appears to be curse words, lots and lots of curse words, unbleeped, unlike the prime-time TV original.
Audiences by and large have found the play refreshingly funny, and Springer himself was reported to have said that he loved it and had only wished that he had thought of it first.
And gosh, if you’ve never seen the original Jerry Springer show and are wondering why it merits an opera about it—it’s hard to explain. But the mixture of shame, aggression, shock, awe and larger-than-life-but-containing-painful-slices-of-life performances, stoked on by ethically questionable producers chasing ratings, came from the same era that saw the rise of WWE yet still revered Luciano Pavarotti and the Muppet Show.
Maybe you had to be there, but going to see this play might be the closest you will get, and might I argue, there is something to be learned from all this madness. Scott Guggenheim called it, “A ridiculously profane, relentlessly irreverent new musical based on American daytime television at its most egregious.” That egregiousness was perhaps a fun-house mirror of what society valued at the time, or perhaps a portent of the circus to come.
But if morality plays aren’t your thing, said Guggenheim, this musical “has everything you’d want in a musical about adulterers, fetishists and pole dancers.”
3Below Theaters & Cafe
288 S Second St, San Jose
Now thru March 17
$65
