After several failed attempts, Richard Thomas’s explosive “Jerry Springer — the Opera” will open in New York, for two nights only, at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday and Thursday. The musical, which was the subject of much controversy when it was staged at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, opened five years ago. Funding for an American version repeatedly fell through, even though the show has generated enough buzz to fill a thousand Broadway theaters. But producers were concerned it would alienate too much of the audience: It was too rude for the satire-appreciating types, yet too elitist and mocking for those in the Springer target demographic.

Indeed, to call the show rude is an understatement. The gamut of Springer’s sorry souls — cheaters, strippers, closet transsexuals — bellow out their grievances in volleys of song. There are tap-dancing Ku Klux Klan members, and the second act features Jerry and guests Satan, Jesus, God, and the Virgin Mary in hell. Jesus is introduced as “the hypocrite son of the fascist tyrant on high” and the Virgin Mary is said to have been “raped by angels.”

So while flocks of fans, piqued by the incredible combination of musical beauty and thematic ugliness, kept the show going for two years in the West End (where it went after the National), plenty were outraged, too.

The displeasure of one group culminated in a hugely publicized case brought against BBC after the network aired a telecast of the show in 2005. In December, the Christian group that sought to prosecute the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, and the producer, Jon Thoday, lost when the High Court ruled that blasphemy laws had not been contravened. The prosecutors, a group called Christian Voice, described the musical as “an offensive, spiteful, systematic mockery and willful denigration of Christian belief.”

As for Springer’s reception stateside, discontent is already mounting. “It’s an all-out assault on Christianity,” the president of the Catholic League, William Donohue, has said. “The way Jesus and our Blessed Mother are talked about is completely unconscionable. It’s mind-boggling that this would pass as humor.”

But the associate director of the National Theatre and former artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre, where the Springer musical made its first trial run, Tom Morris, doesn’t foresee any problems with the Carnegie Hall shows. “My experience of New York is that there is no danger of offense,” Mr. Morris said. He maintained that the musical is a work of truly impressive artistic clout, and that to harbor offense is to miss the point. “The main impact of the show is its extraordinary quality and the extraordinary directness of the writing,” he said. “I don’t just mean the swear words. Richard Thomas has an unusual gift of being able to frame a musical around the natural spoken rhythms of speech, which is really unusual among composers that set lyrics.”

If Mr. Morris’s impatience seems a little strong given the certainly combustive material of the show, he is right to stress its inherent quality. The sprightliness and taut energy of the opening descend into darkness as the setting shifts to hell and the focus becomes more philosophical. The final thought of the play — that neither good nor bad exists — is essentially nihilistic and, to some degree, unsatisfactory. But without doubt this is a golden opportunity to see what all the fuss is about and to see some spectacular theater.