It’s filthy, foul-mouthed, offensive, tasteless, crass, blasphemous and profane. It plays with the most outrageous stereotypes of religion and Africa, it takes the mick (jaw-droppingly) out of female genital mutilation, Aids, child abuse, murderous warlords and religion – and, as the musical’s creators proudly proclaim, it’s back.
The Book of Mormon, which is about to open for a month-long Irish run, in Dublin, is also side-splittingly funny, stuffed with brilliant songs and exuberant dance numbers. Above all, and counterintuitively, it comes with a good heart. It is joyous, outrageous fun.
On a Monday night this month at the West End theatre where the show is continuing its London run, the auditorium is full and the audience is falling around laughing. The couple beside me, who are from Washington, DC, and nabbed tickets an hour ago, are in stitches.
A clue to the musical’s tone is that book, music and lyrics are by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park creators, and by Robert Lopez, one of the creators of the comedy musical Avenue Q. (He and his wife also wrote the songs for Frozen.)
You’re probably familiar with the unlikely set-up: two earnest, young, white-shirted, white-toothed, white-skinned Mormon men – Elder Kevin Price, devout and egotistical, and Elder Arnold Cunningham, sweet, insecure and a compulsive liar – are just out of all-male missionary school. They’re sent to Uganda to convert villagers who are more concerned about Aids, FGM and murderous warlords than they are about the finer points of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The long-running, wickedly satirical production – “the best musical of this century”, according to Ben Brantley of the New York Times – premiered on Broadway in March 2011 and in the West End of London in 2013, and it has been running almost continuously since then, alongside various tours on three continents, amassing multiple Tonys and Oliviers, as well as 30-plus international awards, smashing box-office records along the way: more than 20 million people have now seen it.
“We just passed Rent in the longest-running shows on Broadway,” says Casey Nicholaw, who won an Olivier for The Book of Mormon’s choreography, and directs the production with Parker. “I forget what we are – number 12, maybe, which is pretty unbelievable.
“It’s 14 or 15 years ago we created it. We had no idea how it was going to go or what people would think of it. But we knew with the South Park brand and Matt and Trey’s sense of humour – and Bobby’s humour from Avenue Q – that it would be something special.”
The Book of Mormon is equal-opportunities offensive, tearing strips off Mormons, Ugandans, organised religion, pomposity and proselytising, as well as barbaric practices blighting some parts of Africa. The translation of one blasphemous, fatalistic, jolly song, Hasa Diga Eebowai – a send up of Hakuna Matata from The Lion King – can’t even be indicated here.
Yet the musical has goodness at its core, and turns morality on its head. One wonders if such a show could be made today, in a world terrified of giving offence to anyone, especially in the United States, where the Christian right is not known for a sense of humour. But there it is, packing them in.
Much of the comedy comes from the contrast between the ludicrous fables and teachings of the Mormon backstory about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and tropes around serious challenges in Africa. Elder Arnold combines the two in a pseudoreligious mishmash. Along the way African cultural cliches are sent up – even Bono is slagged – but violence and degradation are satirised with a sharper, explicit edge.
What I think made Book of Mormon a success is that we put all of these subversive things into a familiar musical-theatre box for people
— Casey Nicholaw
This world has become more extreme since The Book of Mormon was first staged, and it is intriguing to read it through the lens of the contemporary United States, where ostensible Christians support appallingly un-Christian acts – and proclaim the Lord’s support for them – where relationships with trust and truth have been sundered, and where the US role in the wider world is radically changing. It seems to turn up the satire, the dodgy historicisation, overlaid with Elder Arnold’s propensity for lying, giving truthiness another spin.
Nicholaw isn’t having any of this. “No, I actually don’t have a thought,” he says about looking at the musical in a wider current context. “I don’t think about it. I just go see the show we created, knowing that we’re treating everything with humour and love and respect, because, you know, there’s nothing we can do about what is happening there. I’m just watching it as a piece of theatre that stands on its own at this point.”
The Book of Mormon’s depiction of Africans has been called racist, mocking, cringeworthy. When the show was closed during Covid, shortly after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, black cast members signed a letter to the creative team warning that, when the show returned after the pandemic, “all of our work will be viewed through a new lens”.
The original creative team responded by spending time in the summer of 2021 reviewing the intent, comic elements and staging of each scene, according to the New York Times. The actor Arbender J Robinson said, “We have a responsibility to make sure we understand what we’re doing, and how it can be perceived”. The revised script sharpened the satire of Mormonism, gave the Ugandan villagers more agency and put them, not the missionaries, at the centre of the work.
“Honestly, there was nothing dramatic about it,” says Nicholaw. “We listened to the cast members if they had concerns, and it wasn’t drama. We knew what we needed to address. And it was very economical. I just saw the show a couple weeks ago, and it’s still in good shape, and it still holds up, and all the little things we did to it just helped it.
“Also, it’s a satire and it’s about knowing [the writers] and their sense of humour. They leaned into it and did it with comedy and with love. It doesn’t feel like it’s an issue. It’s really been lovely, and the cast was great, and we worked for a week on it, getting it back up after the pandemic, and feeling what it was like to be on stage with another human being. It was really a great experience for all of us. We sort of rebooted it, just added a few things. And, like I said, they’re very economical but did the trick.”
He doesn’t want to be specific. “I don’t want to give away surprises. Because I craft things for surprises. But it was just making sure people knew we were in on the jokes, as opposed to making a comment about something and not being part of it, or making a character seem stupid.
“The thing is, we all love musical theatre, and we also love subversive humour. What I think made Book of Mormon a success is that we put all of these subversive things into a familiar musical-theatre box for people. Matt and Trey, we all love musicals, and we made sure we were paying homage to musicals – while also swearing.”
Nicholaw mentions the villagers’ pageant in act two, which dramatises Elder Arnold’s mishmash of Mormonism and local practices, which “could be, out of context, offensive to a lot of people. But they’re doing it because they want to go to a better place, and they want to please someone and have them be proud of their pageant. All the subtext behind it is, ‘Love me. Accept us.’ There’s so much heart in it.”
An irony about the worldwide popularity of The Book of Mormon is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is US-centric, barely impinging on our consciousness in this part of the world, where Mormons are most popularly associated with polygamy – which doesn’t even figure in the musical. (We’ve had plenty of our own religious outlandishness, of course.) How do Mormons view the musical? “They sort of leaned into it, I guess,” Nicholaw says. “They put a big advertisement on 49th Street, early on.” This presumably indicates that no publicity is bad but also that, while outrageous, the satire is not vicious.
Even if Nicholaw must have made a fortune from Mormon’s phenomenal success, he’s still hard at it. He’s talking from Canada – which Donald Trump would like to become part of the US. “The 51st state. Good Lord. It’s, like, you can’t even talk about it. It’s crazy.”
It’s early morning, and he’s in a rehearsal room about to do some early work on circus elements for a stage production of The Greatest Showman in Bristol. In a month he’ll be rehearsing the new Disney musical Hercules in London.
He’s a hoofer, and has worked on multiple Broadway musicals. “So many. Eight as a performer, and then, as a director/choreographer, I’ve done probably 14 on Broadway,” from Aladdin and Spamalot to Something Rotten and Mean Girls. About 18 months ago Nichlow even wound up onstage again briefly, in Some Like it Hot on Broadway, because “we were down too many people. It was the first time I said a line on stage in 20 years. All in, you know, saving the show.”
He has “favourite numbers in every show. I’ve always been a tap dancer. What’s funny is, almost every show I do has a tap number in it, and almost every single time it wasn’t my idea. In the Book of Mormon song Turn it Off, Trey was, like, ‘I think this should be a tap number.’ And I’m, like, ‘Really, I don’t think that goes with the story.’ And, sure enough, it ended up being just right. It just cracks me up: people start going, ‘Oh, it’s that obligatory tap number of Casey’s,’ but it usually comes from someone else. I’ll take it. If everyone else wants it, I’ll do it.”
When he was watching The Book of Mormon on Broadway again recently, he says, “they were all still laughing. The cast is still doing great. Even if I haven’t seen it for a little bit, it’s still our baby. You remember baby’s first steps. It doesn’t feel like it’s a stranger.”
He puts part of the enduring appeal down to the fact that “young kids aren’t allowed to go see it. Maybe it has to do with the generational thing, that suddenly someone’s old enough to watch it.” In Ireland The Book of Mormon is recommended for ages 15 plus, because of its adult themes and explicit language. But “it’s really good and it’s really entertaining, so that’s part of the appeal too. Audiences should sit back and enjoy the humour and the story, because it’s ultimately very uplifting, funny and warm.”
The Book of Mormon opens at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, April 2nd, and runs until Saturday, May 3rd, with a preview on Tuesday, April 1st
