The Book of Mormon: “I usually become suicidal when a grinning idiot on stage breaks into song, but the musical numbers are sheer pleasure”© Joan Marcus/AP/Press Association Images
Nobody who is familiar with the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone is surprised that their Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, has found an audience. As the profane auteurs behind the animated TV series South Park and numerous other projects, the duo don’t seem capable of anything less than devastatingly accurate aim. For over 20 years and three American presidencies, they have deployed armies of half-dimensional dolls in the service of satire. Parker and Stone have become America’s public champions of clear-eyed common sense.
Even so, nobody predicted the magnitude of the show’s success. The Book of Mormon began on Broadway in 2011 and tells the story of two young Mormon missionaries in Uganda. It soon became a wild hit, leaving critics sputtering with praise and the creators awash in awards. In 2012, the show hit the road, making stops throughout the American heartland. It is catching on faster than the Mormon religion itself did back in the 1830s. In February, the show will open at the Prince of Wales theatre in London.
The creators themselves are still shaking their heads about the show’s reception. “We thought it was good,” Parker recently said on American TV, “but we didn’t think it was going to be like this.” As the show continues to reach bigger audiences, it’s worth pausing to consider just how indeed it got to be like this.
When The Book of Mormon came on the scene it was the only show on Broadway that wasn’t embarrassing, nauseatingly expensive dreck. Parker and Stone made the daring move of trying to say something on a Broadway stage instead of simply zipping some kid into a Spiderman suit and having him swing around the rafters on a rope.
For Americans like me, a dramatisation of Mormonism is a way of exploring the strangest parts of ourselves, the best and worst and most contradictory aspects of what it means to be an American. Even though Mormons are outliers, we secretly know that there isn’t anything more all-American than the smiling representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With the earnest belief in their own uniqueness, with their brutal colonial trek westward, with the extreme contradictions between naivety and ambition, zealotry and affability, their quixotic sense of destiny, their genuinely confusing attitude of imperialism with a smile—all of it reminds Americans horribly of ourselves. In the Mormon story, we recognise our own myths and mores taken to their logical extremes, which is extremely funny but also discomfiting and illuminating. Mormons are our rich, weird, ultra-religious cousins: if we bring them down to size through mockery it is done in order to look at them seriously, to isolate our shared family traits.
It is for this reason that non-American and especially Anglo audiences will appreciate the show. In a way, Mormons are to Americans what Americans are to Brits: the rich, weird, ultra-religious cousins. To non-American audiences, a satire of 19-year-old Mormon missionaries in Africa, the dangerous unworldliness of their youthful attitudes, but also their hopefulness and their bold self-mythologising, will read as a broader comedy of Yanks in the big world. In the hands of the show’s creators, this satire is as fresh as ever.
But mostly, it is entertaining. That, more than anything else, is likely to be the reason for the show’s appeal outside of Broadway. The musical numbers are sheer pleasure—and I say this as someone who usually becomes suicidal at the first hint that some grinning idiot on stage is about break into song. Parker and Stone may be iconoclasts on political questions but when it comes to the theatrical arts they are conservatives in the best sort of way. They know what works. They are steeped in the best traditions of comedic song and dance; they know their Rodgers and Hammerstein. At the same time, they are hip and savvy lyricists. English audiences will undoubtedly appreciate the gleeful play these songmen make of the damningly repetitive “of” in the phrase The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
We Americans still feel bad about letting Mitt Romney visit London just before the Olympics—we hope to make it up to the Brits by sending over Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
