“Hello, would you like to change religions and have a free book written by Jesus?” Elder Cunningham (Conner Peirson) asked from center stage, his pressed white shirt glowing under a spotlight. He grinned widely at an imaginary couple through a similarly imaginary doorway, utterly chuffed with himself, until a voice came over the loudspeaker to tell him he’d done it wrong.
He faltered. A small army of Elders around him smiled and took up the task of teaching him without so much as being asked.
Outside the Shubert Theater, a few real New Haven Mormons still milled about.
Inside, they had met their match.
At least, sort of. Peirson’s declaration kicked off the opening number to The Book of Mormon at the Shubert, where it is in town until Sunday. (To find out more about the show, click here.)
Monica L. Patton Photo
The brainchild of Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone of South Park fame, the musical is essentially a work that pushes the envelope without pushing it at all, operating at the apex of parody and stereotype. As it opens on numbers “Hello” and “Two By Two,” we are introduced to elders Price (David Larsen) and Cunningham, who are — along with their newly-minted cohort — about to embark on a two-year mission to Uganda.
A controlled chaos ensues. The missionaries are not prepared for the challenges they face in a new continent, which they enter with a sort of Joseph-Conrad-meets-Lion-King set of assumptions. One of them struggles with a crisis of faith while the other brings converts into the church by bending the Joseph Smith narrative, set in 19th-century America, to accommodate warlords, female genital mutilation, AIDS, and rampant hunger. All of which we see, of course, through his young and whitewashed eyes.
If this sounds lewd, that’s because it is. Crises of faith are punctuated with “Spooky Mormon Hell Dreams” that have Hitler dancing beside Johnnie Cochran. Warlords have names that exist solely to provoke. Young women of color are naive and the kindest white guy in the village is also fat and ruddy-faced, sporting thick glasses. The script has more “fucks” than Eminem’s “Eight Mile.” But it’s a safe kind of lewd, the kind that predominantly white theater audiences paying $120 a pop — more on Broadway — can laugh at all the way home. After all, this is a disadvantaged population far removed from American soil, so we can laugh, right?
It’s more complicated than that, actually. As a play that takes place almost entirely in the headspace of two 19-year-old Mormons, it succeeds in showing the utter absurdity of not just Mormonism, but any religion that is pushed to its proselytizing extremes. It mocks stereotype with an “equal opportunity offender” mentality, although its unnamed Ugandan village ultimately looks like a warped version of Viola Davis’ Emmy speech. Its best points are those of scathing critique for the church: a lush song-and-dance number that exhorts the values of “turning off” gay thoughts; a riff on baptism that plays up the inevitable tension that comes from remaining chaste; and an affirmation of faith — think Wicked‘s “Defying Gravity,” but with Mormons — that indulges every seeming lie in Smith’s “part three” of the bible.
Which points, in turn, to one big fat reason to look past this safe irreverence in which it revels. If you go to a Broadway show, especially one written by the creators of South Park, expecting a work of art that will challenge your conscience and charge your every moral fiber, you are going to be disappointed. There are plenty of contemporary heartrending musicals — the 2006 adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening; Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers’ short-lived Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson; David Bryan’s Memphis; Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and The Angry Inch, in which the original Elder Price (the incomparable Andrew Rannells) has taken over the leading role; and Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s extraordinary Passing Strange — but this is not one of them.
In fact, Book of Mormon is surprisingly traditional in its structure, drawing heavily on Rogers and Hammerstein in both musical pacing and big, obsessively polished numbers made for triple-threat actors. The topic lends itself perfectly to theater, and Peirson and Candice Quarrels (Elder Cunningham and Nabulungi) stand out, measuring up to the transcendent performances of Josh Gad and Nikki M. James in the original Broadway cast. The ensemble overall puts on number after visually delicious number.
That’s the point at the end of the night, too. It’s not a play about believing in God. It’s about believing in spectacle.