THE Covid-delayed Scottish dates of the hit Broadway musical The Book Of Mormon have been eagerly anticipated.
Now that Elder Price, Elder Cunningham and their fellow Mormon missionaries have finally arrived, I’m glad to report that the show has been well worth the wait.
Written, famously, by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators and writers of TV comic animation South Park) and Robert Lopez (lyricist and composer on adult puppet show Avenue Q), the show is everything fans of comic music theatre could wish for, and more.
Taking us from the training centre in Salt Lake City (which churns out the young, white, male missionaries who proselytise for the Mormon cause) to a blighted village community in northern Uganda, the show is every bit as satirical, scabrous and scatological as one would expect of a collaboration between Parker, Stone and Lopez.
Indeed, so liberal is the play with profanities that one couldn’t help but wonder if the entire cast was risking arrest, given that Edinburgh’s finest had recently lifted a young, republican protester whose placard carried a solitary f-word. However, the company escaped the attentions of Police Scotland, going on to delight a huge Edinburgh Playhouse audience that raised the roof when the all-dancing, all-swearing cast took their bows.
The show’s central conceit is a brilliant (and very funny) one. The unlikely pairing of handsome high-achiever Elder Price and geeky fantasist Elder Cunningham are sent – not to Price’s prayed-for destination of Orlando, Florida – but to a Ugandan village which is menaced by a vicious warlord with a highly amusing (but unprintable) name and in which Aids is all but ubiquitous.
Add to that extreme poverty and the fact that the local doctor himself is cursed with maggots in his scrotum, and it is little wonder that the villagers were already disenchanted with God before the Mormons showed up. The song in which the furious Ugandans sing the now infamous chorus “Hasa Diga Eebowai” (which, to put it diplomatically, suggests emphatically that God go away) has proved to be so uproariously successful in the 11 years since the musical premiered that T-shirts carrying the profane legend can be purchased in the foyer.
Robert Colvin (sparkle-toothed Price) and Conner Peirson (the hapless Cunningham) excel equally in comedy, song and dance as their characters attempt to sell the Mormons’ unintentionally hilarious third, US-based book of Christian revelation. Aviva Tulley (knowingly innocent as young villager Nabulungi) and Ewen Cummins (sympathetically wise as her vigilant father Mafala Hatimbi) shine amid a universally fabulous cast.
The exaggerated squalor of Scott Pask’s set design emphasises the serious politics that underlies the show’s explosive comedy. The song and dance provide an extraordinary set of pastiches of the American stage and film musical tradition, from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to Mel Brooks.
Who knew that tap-dancing Mormons and a Star Wars-inflected community musical could be this funny? Thank God for The Book Of Mormon!
At Edinburgh Playhouse until October 8; playing Theatre Royal, Glasgow, November 9-26: thebookofmormonmusical.com
