Harvey Keitel at Carnegie Hall in Jerry Springer: the Opera

Oh hear America singing, citizens of New York, as you never have heard it before. Hearken to your everyday sisters and brothers — the lost, the lonely, the fetishists, the freaks — as their voices swell and meld into one common chord of longing: to be seen, to be heard, to be (oh yes) famous.

Will it turn out that the great American musical of the early 21st century is an opera born in Britain? A convincing case for the rights to that title was made by the celestial “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” the notorious show from London about the transcendent within tabloid television, when it opened Tuesday night in a gorgeously sung concert version at Carnegie Hall for a sinfully short run of two performances.

Now “celestial” might seem an ill-chosen adjective for a work devoted to the raw and nasty public doings of a throng of aspiring celebrities with dirty little secrets expressed in dirty little words. But this remarkable work — which features a spectacularly inventive score by Richard Thomas, with a book and lyrics by Mr. Thomas and Stewart Lee — uncovers something grand within the small, squalid lives it portrays.

Those who attended “Jerry Springer,” which stars an affectingly disaffected Harvey Keitel in the nonsinging title role, expecting to snigger and hoot were not disappointed. There’s a guaranteed off-the-charts camp quotient in a show that sets the televised confessions of pole-dancing housewives and men with diaper fixations to music that often leans more toward Bach than Broadway.

In terms of sheer audacity, “Jerry Springer” is a helluva lot funnier than, say, “Young Frankenstein.” This is, after all, a work that features numbers with mock-liturgical titles like “Jerry Eleison.” And though I’d love to say that the demonstrators who assembled outside the theater on Tuesday to protest a show that “blasphemes our Lord” would be disarmed if they ever got to see “Jerry Springer,” I can’t.

They would find all the ammunition they need to continue their vigil in the show’s otherworldly second act.

But from the moment the chorus files on, caroling in sweet harmony and sour language about the television host who fills their lives with wonder and excitement, you intuit that there’s much more than easy satire afoot. If there weren’t, the basic joke of combining sacred music and profane content would endure for only the length of a cabaret comedy sketch.

That “Jerry Springer,” directed here by Jason Moore, only occasionally loses traction during its two-and-a-half-hour length is because it hears genuine beauty in the hunger for glory of the attention-starved souls it portrays. If the real “Jerry Springer Show” turns its rowdy, angry guests into objects of sneering sport, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” sees them as figures of passion, whose impulses, however base, translate into song that reaches for the stars. Laugh, if you will, with smug urbane knowingness. But the soulfulness in the music — performed by a cast that mixes Broadway sheen with classical heft — rises again and again to rebuke you.

O.K., before I get too highfalutin, let’s address the outrage factor that sparked a firestorm of protests in London after the show was (unwisely) shown on BBC television three years ago. (Before that “Jerry Springer: The Opera” had enjoyed a relatively untroubled existence of critical esteem and commercial success at the National Theater before transferring to the West End.)

The first act, which depicts the taping of a fairly typical Jerry Springer episode (bisexual cheating fiancé, diaper fetishist, woman with strip-club dreams), surely has more obscenities per minute than any work that ever played Carnegie Hall. But it’s the second act, which takes Jerry straight to hell to arbitrate a debate between Jesus and the Devil, that has raised hackles high.

The show, which was originally conceived as only one act, isn’t as strong in the second act as the first. An air of glib, giggly impiety — of an adolescent urge to see just how much it can get away with — is more clearly evident here, as Jesus (Lawrence Clayton) and Satan (David Bedella) squabble like potty-mouthed siblings, and God (Luke Grooms) shows up to complain about how weary it is to be he (in an irresistible high-corn-pone aria).

But even this half is infused with what is truly shocking about “Jerry Springer: The Opera”: an all-embracing empathy that finds the sublime in the squalid and vice versa. Mr. Thomas’s score — which blends, among other elements, Baroque oratorio, Gershwin-esque gospel and Samuel Barber-esque arias — unfailingly lends grandeur to lives contemptuously dismissed as “trailer trash” by Jerry’s warm-up man (also Mr. Bedella, who created the part in London and wears it with radiant naturalness).

Backed by a small but sumptuous orchestra led by Stephen Oremus, both the chorus members (who function, among other things, as the Springer studio audience and a chorus line of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen) and soloists fully meet the music’s demands, even more than the performers I saw in London several years ago.
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