Ever since it premiered on Broadway in 2011, The Book of Mormon has been an astonishing hit. Astonishing because of its sheer numbers – seventeen million people have seen the show worldwide — but also its subject matter. The musical, after all, follows a pair of mismatched teen Mormon missionaries who attempt to spread the word in Africa, as real-life Mormon missionaries are wont to do. Who’d think that would make for a great night out?
It’s a funny old world where The Book of Mormon can mean two things: on one hand, the founding text of one of America’s most entrenched religions; on the other, a shiny, naughty, potty-mouthed and big-hearted musical, sending up said text and other absurdities of faith. And it’s safe to say that the second is very rapidly catching up in popularity with the first. Ever since its premiere at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York it has been a critical and commercial hit, conquering cities across America, Canada and Australia as well as Broadway and London’s West End. The musical is now about to tackle cities in the UK and continental Europe.
“We thought we really wanted to just open up a Broadway show, have it be successful, and we thought we could do that,” explains Trey Parker, sat in the studio where he makes the satirical cartoon South Park with his work partner Matt Stone. “But we didn’t think it would be this. We did have some confidence in it, but we didn’t think it would be this.”
The pair is sat in their west Los Angeles HQ, where they are in the middle of the six-day cycle which produces a South Park episode. The method hasn’t much changed since they first started airing in 1997, and the tone hasn’t either: in those two decades, the duo hasn’t shied away from any target, ever, from Osama bin Laden to Oprah Winfrey. Are there any topics that haven’t worked? “This one this week that we’re trying to do?”, chuckles Stone with good-natured exasperation. Every week, they admit, it’s pretty much the same feeling, until it’s not. Stone — who seems the slightly calmer, fixed presence, while Parker paces restlessly around the room — yawns. “We’ll figure it out. We find the funny in everything.”
In many ways, The Book of Mormon’s kinship to the South Park oeuvre is quite clear. There are few musicals on the main stage which make eye-popping jokes about cannibalism, rape, AIDS and FGM and the medicinal virtues of having sex with frogs. Yet it’s also a classic coming-of-age tale, even a (platonic) love story, which pays tribute to many of the musical greats — no surprise when you consider that Parker has been a musicals nut since childhood (he eventually converted Stone). They co-wrote The Book of Mormon with Robert Lopez, who was making a name for himself in musical theatre as the co-creator of Avenue Q.
Aficionados of the genre will easily spot tributes to The Music Man and The Sound of Music, to The King and I and to The Lion King. However, The Lion King this is not: the Africa which Price and Cunningham arrive in, two perky 19 year olds from Salt Lake City, is more a sun-drenched Armageddon. Reaching an understanding with it – and with their faith, and with each other – is the crux of the show.
“It’s really two kids coming out of high school, basically, going out into the world, and thinking they’ve kind of got it and they know it all,” spells out Parker. “And getting their asses handed to them. And I think anyone around the world can relate to that a little bit.” Indeed for most viewers, the most shocking thing about The Book of Mormon won’t be its humour, but its heart. The show thrives on a kind of bromance as the two Elders – bustling, bright-eyed, all-achieving Price, and the schlubby, eccentric, prone-to-lying Cunningham – are lumped together and make the most of it. And you could say it’s born from a bromance too.
In 2003 Parker and Stone went to see the musical Avenue Q – a huge success thanks to its pairing of cutesy Sesame Street-style puppets with shocking, sweary confessions (a sample song: ‘The Internet is for Porn’). The pair, who loved it, were surprised to see a thank you note to them in the programme, from a man they had never met: Lopez. The New Yorker, who had co-written the show, and has since gone on to write the music for Frozen, and become the rare recipient of a double EGOT (winner of at least two Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, Oscars, and Tony Awards). Lopez was expressing gratitude to them for their South Park movie, the musical film, for which Parker got an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1999 (for the hilarious ‘Blame Canada’); it had been a major inspiration to him. The three met afterwards and had a casual chat about the projects they’d like to do next. What Lopez admitted floored them: “I’d love to do something on Joseph Smith, and Mormons…?”
Parker and Stone thought they were the only ones. Mormonism and Joseph Smith — the man who officially founded it in 1830 somewhere on the east side of America — is not really your average enthusiasm. The story of Smith, who claimed he was presented with two golden plates by angels, and who wrote down their contents as this all-important Book of Mormon – is a key piece of American history, but might appear essentially weird and niche. But this, naturally, is what made it appeal to Parker and Stone who, growing up in Colorado, just one state across from the Mormon heartland of Utah, were well aware of this branch of Christianity.
“We grew up with Mormons,” shrugs Parker, “we had Mormon friends, my first girlfriend was Mormon. I mean, it’s weirder that Bobby had a fascination.” “For us it was next door, but he grew up in New York City,” laughs Stone. Yet Lopez, like them, was drawn to the outlandishness of the Smith story too (those golden plates, for instance – no-one else ever saw them). In short, the trio had a shared sensibility.
What followed was a long, protracted bouncing about of ideas, covering several years. “We dabbled with it a long time”, admits Parker. When he and Stone weren’t working on South Park, and Lopez wasn’t pursuing his own projects, they would meet up and write songs on their favourite theme. Just songs, for now. “We almost did it like a band,” says Parker. “It was really, ‘let’s make an album’. I really wanted to just make this thing, and sit down with my dad and press play.” Preparation also included attending the annual Hill Cumorah pageant in New York State, where the Mormons tell the story of their religion in their own defiantly showbiz style. “It was an 800-person musical!”, says Stone fondly. Even weirder, though, was observing the pageant being protested by other Christian sects, outraged at the Mormons’ take.
“I remember there was a little kid there just saying to me, ‘You’re gonna burn in hell’, because he assumed I was a Mormon,” recounts Parker. “And I was watching him, like :you have no idea, kid. I’m going to SUPER burn in hell. Like, REALLY burn in hell. You’re worried about these guys…?”
The first six or seven songs – deeply melodic, wickedly funny, as all the show’s songs would be – arrived very quickly. And so the next question became, what is the story here? And how should it be told? For Parker and Stone, who’d only worked on screen, a film seemed the obvious conclusion. But as the group began to workshop the songs with singers and performers, its identity as a live show became clearer. Stranger yet, it was not some quirky off-Broadway venture, but a big gleaming mainstream show, despite its bracing subversiveness.
The rest is already a kind of showbiz history. The team premiered the show on Broadway, where it soon gained rapturous acclaim. And here’s the surprising thing – there was barely any outrage of any sort. No picketing, no protests inside the theatre, no performances cancelled to allow for shocked sensibilities. Surprising to outsiders – but not to Parker and Stone. “Me and Trey called it,” shrugs Stone.
“Everyone beforehand was like, ‘are you worried?’,” relays Parker. The general assumption is that when you expose a global religion to ridicule, someone somewhere may kick off. “And we were like, no. Because we know Mormons. Mormons are nice people and they’re smart people. We didn’t think they’d go so far as to take out ads in our programme…” It’s true: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints respected the musical’s right to say what it wanted about them, and they even decided to piggyback on the show’s success, pointing punters to the actual, original Book of Mormon in the show’s official literature. Parker and Stone can only admire the move. “They trumped us, really,” shrugs Parker.
The church’s reaction to the show highlights that The Book of Mormon, for all its foul-mouthed fun, is a much more complex beast, one which celebrates the joys of faith as much as it parodies it. It would be cruel to give too much away, but suffice to say that the two Elders push the stories of Mormonism very far – before realising, like we do, that these are also stories which people often need, and which help them to behave better.
The show is, the two point out, about so much more than religion. It’s about the delusions of a certain type of America, and the misperception of a certain type of Africa; it’s about friendship and growing up. Yet the question does remain what the team were doing by making this very particular show about this very particular religion. For Parker and Stone, it’s obvious: they chose Mormonism because they grew up close to it; because their tradition of sending their young ones out to foreign lands was fodder for a good old-fashioned culture clash; and because, yes, they could take it.
“There is an element to comedy that is ‘laugh at these people’”, admits Stone. “The Book of Mormon uses that mockability of the Mormons – and then tries to tell you a larger story, and rope you in and open it up. Laughter breaks down your defences, you know? And then you’re open to a different story.” It’s a story which seems set to keep on spreading, like the faith that inspired it in the first place.
The Book of Mormon is at Norwich Theatre Royal between 19 – 30 Aug. For more information or to book, visit norwichtheatre.org or call the Box Office on 01603 630 000.