Reverend Michael Jensen, son of Sydney’s Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, has publicly dismissed Jerry Springer: The Opera as “a vile piece… which offends religious people” and has urged people not to protest against it.

The show, which previews tonight at the Sydney Opera House, has instigated protests and court action from religious groups in the UK, as well as critical acclaim.

In an article on Sydneyanglicans.net, Jensen [pictured] writes, “It is… not really that good – I saw some of it when it was shown on the BBC. The premise of the opera is that the freaks (trans-sexuals, transvestites, deviants – the usual line-up) of the Jerry Springer show get translated into hell, with all the characters taking on second roles as Satan, Mary, God and so on. And so, among other things, Montel, the guy who likes to wear a nappy and soil himself, becomes Jesus. True to the original, the opera has some incredibly bad language (legend has it that there are 8,000 swear words in the script!). It has some satirical component to it I suppose (I mean, the whole Jerry Springer thing needed to be taken to the cleaners, didn’t it?) but it isn’t that funny and it isn’t that clever.”

Of course, the 8000 swear word myth is total fantasy. It’s been calculated 8,000 obscenities over the show’s 2 hour running time would mean that there were 66 obscenities per minute – that’s over one per second.

Jensen says that while the “Lord is being terribly besmirched by this tawdry show”, Christians should not protest in the streets like they did when the show toured in the UK. “Surely we don’t want to participate in the protest/victimhood discourse that in the end is so harmful to our community?... I think it actually damages the cause of the gospel when we pose as just another protest group in society that is making noise for its own space. If we are not convincing in showing that what we are arguing for is not the good of our own sector of the community but the good of the community as a whole, then our gospel becomes just more white noise.”

Opera House’s chief executive, Richard Evans, this week told the Herald, “It is certainly not our intention to offend anybody. My sense is that Our Lord is more robust than some people might imagine.”

The show’s producer Andrew Spencer told the Herald that the show is not blasphemous at all, and that its main message is acceptance.

“So what if we have a black Jesus who’s a little bit gay. At the end of the day, it’s all about love … It’s using the Springer show as a vehicle to sort out issues of good and bad.”

David Bedella, who plays Satan in the show, told Same Same that he’s actually a devout Christian himself, and that the UK protests from Christian right wing extremists gave Christianity a bad name.

“They make people think that we’re all as crazy as they are. Most of the people who were doing the protests were doing it out of ignorance. Over and over I’d go outside the theatre and I’d have conversations with them, I’d invite them in to see the show. I’d tell them ‘I know you’re upset about it, I can get you free tickets, I can put you in the balcony and you can watch, and then we can have an informed conversation about what it is you’re protesting,’ and universally they’d say, ‘nope, we don’t need to see it to know that it’s bad, we don’t need to see it to know that it’s blasphemy.’ So you were dealing with a level of ignorance there that really was hard to have conversation with.”