The drizzle outside may have deterred the rumoured protests, but they failed to dampen audience expectation as the curtain rose on Jerry Springer The Opera to rapturous attention. And on the whole, the attention was justified – this production was explosive.

It is an opera in three acts, and in the first act we are introduced to the studio audience of the eponymous Jerry Springer show – people who eat, excrete and watch TV. Hearing luridly obscene descriptions sung beautifully to lush live music is inherently amusing, at least for the first ten minutes. And by the time it’s wearing thin, the jokes have started: Jerry has made his entrance.

Max Upton as Jerry Springer is a revelation. In the only non-singing role, he is an expert showman, guiding the action as he wrestles with the audience, his inner Valkyrie and the devil. He has a great stage presence and impeccably deft comic timing and uses the many one-liners gifted to him by a brilliant script to full effect. Jerry is needed and adored by his audience: he speaks for them and they love him.

We’re introduced to a series of damaged people desperate for their “Jerry Springer moment”; a fifteen second slice of humiliating recognition. As you’d expect, there are amusingly choreographed fight scenes and spectacular set pieces. There are times early on where you wonder where it’s going – when the sexy diaper dance is going on and on and you’re not sure how much faecal singing is yet to come – but it proves ultimately worthwhile.

It gleefully plunges into fresh depths of obscenity and crudity at every turn; surpassing itself with each fresh twist of depravity, including a tantalising Klu Klux Klan video (which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write) that must have been an agony to film. No sooner have we been given a glimpse of the video than the stage is immersed with them, frolicking and tap-dancing. The first act draws to a spectacular close; a nice inversion means Jerry’s ‘final thought’ is his final; he’s been shot, and the curtain falls to his prone body and a burning cross dominating the stage.

The second act takes place in purgatory; Jerry is confronted by his guests, who were killed after confrontations on his show. Jerry responds to this news with “a person with less broadcasting experience might feel responsible”;  Satan entreats him to present a Special, with confrontations of biblical proportions. The third act may have been hell for the characters but it was heaven for the audience. In clever mimicry of the first act the characters are played by earlier freaks to have appeared on the show – God played by a love-rat, Eve by a pole-dancer. This Opera has an incendiary past, as most non-hermits will know, but what is striking is how little there is that is worthy of offence and the lack of malicious intent. It is pointedly gratuitous, sure; but its aims are TV culture, religion and the cult of personality – all worthy targets that it accurately and amusingly skewers.

This clever piece was intelligently staged – the balconies encircled the studio on either side, giving a gladiatorial, combative air that perfectly captured the atmosphere of antagonism. A slim curtain at the back raised to reveal a pole-dancing pole and, later, a divine throne. This lovely parallel worked dramatically but they looked genuinely dangerous. There were, of course, some minor and a few major sound and technical issues, but to focus on them would be petty and miss the point of the production in which Ben Atkinson’s orchestration was superb and the singing excellent throughout: the vocal duel between Jesus and Satan was a particular highlight, lasting an impossibly long time before the excellent Steve could prize them apart. Jerry’s journey from odious to empathetic culminates in the dissemination of a series of moral messages far less esoteric than those in philosophy textbooks, and perhaps more true.

It’s difficult to begrudge this Opera anything – it’s shamelessly gaudy, confrontational and utterly fun.