"THE Mormons are coming!” exclaim adverts on double-decker buses as they glide along the streets of Edinburgh. And, indeed, following a Covid-enforced postponement, the invasion of Scotland by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is finally about to happen.
Worry not, however, your doorbell is safe. Your early evening telly watching isn’t about to be disturbed by over-earnest young American men wearing white shirts and black name badges.
The Mormons in question are the cast of the smash-hit musical theatre satire The Book Of Mormon. Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the duo behind the long-running comic animation South Park) and Robert Lopez (co-creator of puppet stage comedy Avenue Q) the show follows a pair of Mormon missionaries as they attempt to convert the members of a remote village community in Uganda to their distinctly American-centric brand of Christianity.
The musical premiered on Broadway in 2011 and has become an international success. The American production continues to fill houses at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York City.
The London company is still plying its trade at the Prince of Wales Theatre, and the UK touring cast heads to the Edinburgh Playhouse this week and the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in November. There have also been successful productions in Australia, Sweden and Norway. Altogether, more than 17 million people have seen the show.
But what is it that has theatre audiences flocking to a comic musical about Mormons?
First, there’s the South Park effect.
Parker and Stone’s cartoon about smalltown Colorado kids Stan, Kyle, Eric and Kenny has become bona fide cult TV since it was first aired in 1997. A quarter of a century on, South Park continues to have a firm stranglehold on the zeitgeist.
That’s why, a year ago, the show’s producers ViacomCBS and Paramount Plus signed deals with Parker and Stone that will take the TV series up to 2027 and create another 14 South Park movies over a six-year period. By any standards – including those of Broadway – Parker and Stone are a massive box office draw.
However, that acclaim alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain The Book Of Mormon’s 11-year success story. The show itself attracts not only South Park devotees, but many fans of the stage musical genre.
By all accounts, religion hasn’t been this funny since Graham Chapman was a “very naughty boy” in the title role of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian back in 1979. Reviewing the Broadway premiere in 2011, the New York Times’s critic Ben Brantley warned that the show was “blasphemous, scurrilous and more foul-mouthed than David Mamet on a blue streak”.
However, he went on to reassure readers to “trust me when I tell you that its heart is as pure as that of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show”. Brantley was impressed by Parker and Stone’s knowledge of the American musical theatre songbook, and by the numerous references to it in The Book Of Mormon.
He also greatly enjoyed the show’s panoply of characters. The musical takes two keen, young Mormon missionaries (named Kevin Price and Arnold Cunningham) from their Church’s HQ in Salt Lake City and places them in a Ugandan village that has very few reasons to be thankful to God.
THERE, Brantley explains, they meet “a one-eyed, genocidal warlord with an unprintable name”, a group of villagers who are “riddled with Aids [and] who have a few choice words for the God who let them wind up this way”. Add to that a “guy who keeps announcing that he has maggots in his scrotum”.
Put that way, the narrative and characters of The Book Of Mormon certainly sound like the brash and bold products of the overactive imaginations of the creators of South Park.
For their part, Parker and Stone embarked on their musical with a certain degree of confidence. “We really wanted to just open up a Broadway show, have it be successful, and we thought we could do that,” Parker told journalist Louis Wise.
Songs – such as the much-loved theme tune and the hilarious Blame Canada (from the adolescently titled 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut) – have always been part of South Park’s success. So, a certain level of cockiness about the success of The Book Of Mormon could be forgiven.
That said, even Parker and Stone were taken aback by the sheer level of critical and audience acclaim. “We didn’t think it would be this,” Parker admitted. “We did have some confidence in it, but we didn’t think it would be this.”
The ongoing eulogies for the show seem to be rooted in the brave balance the show achieves between raucous satire and an altogether gentler contemplation of the human condition. The musical might extract the proverbial urine from the Mormon Church on an industrial scale, but it has also been described as a “platonic love story” in its portrayal of the hapless missionaries Price and Cunningham.
Parker explains: “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.” The pair end up, the writer continues, “getting their asses handed to them ... I think anyone around the world can relate to that a little bit”.
“But why Mormons?,” you might ask. The answer is rather prosaic. Parker and Stone “grew up with Mormons”, says Parker. “We had Mormon friends, my first girlfriend was Mormon.”
Those statements might seem strange in a Scottish context. However, in the US the church has more than six-and-a-half million members.
As fortune had it, after Parker and Stone went to see Avenue Q (which they loved), they discovered that Lopez (who had publicly expressed his admiration for the South Park creators) shared their fascination with Mormonism. Perhaps even weirder than this mutual interest is the fact that Lopez was a songwriter on the Disney animation Frozen.
It’s a long way from Let It Go to a Ugandan man with maggots in his scrotum.
The Book of Mormon plays the Edinburgh Playhouse, September 13 to October 8, and the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, November 9-26: atgtickets.com
