Joan Marcus
The March 2015 run of "The Book of Mormon" sold out in three hours, prompting Overture to land an encore production May 9-14, 2017.
If you've been eagerly awaiting seeing Book of Mormon on the Madison tour stop, I hope you secured your tickets. Overture sold approximately 17,500 tickets in a little over 12 hours for its five-day engagement of the wildly successful Broadway musical. If you haven't, and you're feeling lucky, get to the Overture Center two hours before curtain to enter your name in the lottery for $25 tickets. It's a steal: Even after four years, the best seats in New York can easily run $400. Book of Mormon picked up nine Tony awards in 2011, including Best Musical.
Why are mainstream audiences still thronging theaters for this show? It's wickedly funny. The creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are the geniuses behind South Park, and they write sharp satire and absolutely hilarious lyrics. The show is also astonishingly crude. Nothing is off limits in Parker and Stone's smart yet puerile humor.
But even as the show heartily skewers the tenets of the Mormon religion, it has a remarkable sweetness at its core. The two central characters, the good-looking and self-centered Elder Price (Billy Harrigan Tighe) and the nebbish Elder Cunningham (A.J. Holmes), are good people, and they get better. The musical moves from missionary school in Utah to their posting in a tiny village in Uganda. The villagers greet them with an anthem reminiscent of the Lion King -- "Hasa diga eebowai" -- translated, to the horror of the missionaries, to "Fuck you, God." The Ugandans are too busy dealing with poverty, AIDS and a threatening warlord to pay much attention, until Elder Cunningham starts improvising. When Mormon leaders arrive to find out why the mission is having so much success, the villagers put on a show: The result must be the most profane mash-up of religious misunderstandings and pop culture ever set to music.
The Book of Mormon cast is impeccable. The cheery Mormons dance their way through numbers urging them to squelch their feelings, including same-sex attractions. And the villagers shock and delight, even as they start to believe that Mormonism might be an escape from the mutilation they will face at the hands of General Butt-Fucking Naked (the commanding Corey Jones). Alexandra Ncube is phenomenal as Nabulungi, the young girl who dreams of escaping to "Sal Tlay Ka Siti" (Salt Lake City).
The living dioramas illustrating the bizarre aspects of the Mormon tradition are some of the best parts of the show, including a Jesus who sounds just like a South Park character. Another standout is the Ziegfeld Follies-style number "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream," featuring dancing demons and skeletons, Adolph Hitler, Gengis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer and Johnnie Cochran.
Although flawlessly executed, the score for The Book of Mormon contains few surprises. Robert Lopez (who also co-wrote the music for Frozen), deftly harnesses Broadway clichés in send-ups of popular show tunes. But in aggregate, they are unmemorable, with the important exception of Stone and Parker's lyrics.
Part of the appeal of this no-holds-barred comedy is its transgressive quality. But I still marvel at the popularity of the crude humor. Looking around at Overture's fairly typical audience, I wondered how many were familiar enough with the show to expect jokes about having sex with babies to prevent AIDS, clitoral mutilation, murderous warlords and the myriad jokes that involve body parts. When it's all wrapped up in a musical, it goes down easy. And anything wrapped up by Parker and Stone is pretty much golden.
In a beautiful example of life imitating art, real Mormons have been making contact with the Madison audience members by purchasing several full-page ads in the show's playbill. The Latter-day Saints have sent groups of missionaries to greet theater patrons streaming into the Overture Center.
Elder Baird, a smiling, young fellow who looks like he was plucked from Central Mormon Casting, offered me a free copy of the real Book of Mormon. He says the show is "a great opportunity" and hopes the show will gain his mission some more converts, or at least spark curiosity. "It seems like quite a few people are a little more interested in learning more about the real Book of Mormon because they're seeing the play," says the optimistic Baird, who hails from a small town in Utah.
Has Elder Baird seen the play? "I have not. The only thing that's keeping me is just the vulgar language," he says. "I've heard that it's a very funny play."
