By: James Banyard
The Book of Mormon, the global super-smash hit from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, nine-time Tony Award and four-time Olivier winning Best Musical, which landed this week at TRP, is a show with a lot of swearing. A. Lot.
Having not seen the show before, despite opening back in 2011, I chat to a fellow reviewer before the performance and ask: “But, is it any good?” He looks at me funny, and says, “Yes. But are you easily offended?”
I was a fan of South Park thirty years ago, and the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and I admired Team America: World Police, which was a note perfect parody of US hard and soft power as expressed by a team of crack marionettes. If you’ve seen these works of art too, all of your expectations will be met. Mine were.
The plot follows golden balls Mormon Elder Price (Adam Bailey) and wobbly wheel Elder Cunningham (Sam Glenn) as they graduate from Mormon University in Salt Lake City, before being sent out into the world. Instead of cushy Orlando, Florida, they are despatched to Uganda, wherever that is.
Cunningham and Price, an archetypal odd couple, are forced to negotiate their new relationship in the departure lounge at Salt Lake City airport. Their song, ‘You And Me (But Mostly Me)’ sums up the mood. On arrival in Africa, the tone changes sharply from the idealistic and cosseted school environment as some kind of skinned kangaroo is dragged across the stage, and a cathartic song about resisting fate that challenges the Mormon’s value system is belted out by the cast. Once you learn what Hasa Diga Eebowai means, you’ll suddenly feel good about the world. Or, if you attend church regularly, perhaps just hurry along to the next paragraph.
Their arrival in Uganda is the moment the show takes off.
Following an assertive and irreversible intervention from a local warlord, (Rodney Earl Clark) whose name in the programme is coyly ‘General’ but on stage is something more fruity, a blood spattered Elder Price wails, ‘Africa is nothing like the Lion King!’
The only hardship for the audience, for a US production, is to realise you are invited to see the world as the American public see it, which is – once again for Parker and Stone – the real target of their satire. British audiences can clap along, laugh at the rude words, and enjoy the comedic set ups, but we are perhaps on the margins of the whole shebang.
Despite that, this is a show with high production values, and plenty of bang for your buck. It works at its best through subtle juxtaposition of serious issues with potty-mouth feel good songs, and wild fantastical scenes. My favourite is the Mormon version of hell. This hellscape is witty and doesn’t put a foot, or note, wrong.
The New York Times called it ‘The best musical of this century,’ which might upset some fans of Hamilton, but the songs and lyrics are accomplished, and the live band in the pit very welcome. Irreverent is too mild a word to describe the action on stage, especially at its peak with the painful results of Elder Price’s rectal x-ray being all too clear to see.
You won’t need persuading to come and see The Book of Mormon. The audience loved it, laughed wholeheartedly, and left with a fuller, if slightly skewed, understanding of Mormon History.