When Jerry Springer: The Opera became an unlikely smash in London in 2002, a Broadway edition appeared to be inevitable.

But cautious producers worried that the gross-out oratorio about the trailer-trash talkmeister would be too un-American for those fragile times. More problematic, clearly, was the bad-taste glee with which the show battered Judeo-Christian beliefs. When a flabby black Jesus in a diaper conceded to being "a bit gay," it wasn't hard to imagine the reverent hysteria over a commercial transfer.

After multiple awards, a BBC telecast and several regional productions in this country, the show finally had its New York premiere -- not as a Broadway extravaganza but as two semi-staged concerts starring an oddly uneasy Harvey Keitel, as Jerry himself, at Carnegie Hall.

Indeed, a few dozen protesters sang and held candles on the street. And inside the hallowed hall, low-lifes called one another “loser” and confessed unprintable “guilty secrets” while proclaiming, in transcendentally luscious melody, "This is my Jerry Springer moment ... So dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians. I don't want this moment to die."


So is this our Jerry Springer moment? Or, rather, hasn't the moment passed us by?

Jerry Springer is a one-joke guilty pleasure. It’s a derivative wild thing, about as blasphemous as Jesus Christ, Superstar, with a tapping Ku Klux Klan number that owes its soul to “Springtime for Hitler.” The book, by co-lyricist Stewart Lee and composer Richard Thomas, says nothing about tiresome bottom-feeding celebrity culture that the culture doesn't constantly say about itself.

And yet ...

The gimmick -- and it’s a beauty -- is its inappropriately gorgeous music. Thomas and Lee have wrapped their pathetic misfits, mob-rule morons and scatological exhibitionists in a hybrid of pop with uplifting faux-Baroque choruses, gut-wrenching counterpoint and introspective faux-opera arias. The mass of voices, the dueling duets and the internal monologues are meant to bring a nobility to people who hurtle “stupid whore” and “slut junky” at one another and brag, “We eat, we excrete and watch TV.”

The concerts, directed with alarming gusto by Jason Moore (Avenue Q) and music director Stephen Oremus (Wicked), use lots of outlandish costumes and some witty videos projected on a screen. Keitel, who does not sing, may not be enough of a showboater to inhabit Jerry, the slippery center of so many others' ambitions.

But David Bedella, the only holdover from the London original, has a devilish understatement to the fury of the warm-up comic, who just may be Satan. Luke Grooms, one of the few opera-trained members of the cast, brings a booming authority to the Lord himself. Laura Shoop has a diabolical sweetness and an almost coloratura reach as Baby Jane. And when the “studio audience” switches from stupid tyrants to make a liturgical mass on the words “Jerry Eleison,” the effect is disturbingly uplifting.

Jerry gets shot during a taping at the end of the first act. Forced to moderate a conflict involving Satan, Jesus and the Virgin Mary in hell, he insists, “I don’t solve problems. I just televise them.” Fine. But when he concludes that “nothing is wrong and nothing is right,” we are painfully aware of how far the world has moved from the self-conscious naughtiness of the show.