The Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon, comedic and deliberately offensive stage musical by Robert Lopez, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone that satirizes religious belief in general and the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in particular. The show premiered on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on March 24, 2011, and won nine Tony Awards, including for best musical, best book of a musical, and best original score. It also won a Grammy for best musical theater album.

Plot

The musical’s coming-of-age story follows a young and assured LDS missionary named Kevin Price and his nerdy missionary companion Arnold Cunningham, an imaginative and compulsive liar, as they attempt to evangelize the people of a Ugandan village. The irrelevance of the LDS message to the difficult lives of the villagers—who face poverty, famine, an HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the violent threats of a local warlord (the General), among other problems—challenges Price’s faith. Abandoned by Price and seeking to impress the beautiful and naive villager Nabulungi, the inept but well-meaning Cunningham freely borrows from Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and other sources to fancifully create new “biblical” stories that are more applicable to the lives of the villagers. Surprisingly, he soon converts the entire village to this unorthodox LDS faith. Meanwhile, Price has a vividly choreographed nightmare in which he is sent to hell for leaving Cunningham, and he becomes convinced that a grandiose leap of faith will help redeem him. Assuring himself that he still affirms LDS teachings, Price brazenly seeks to convert the violent General. When he fails, a shaken Price returns to the village and accepts that religious orthodoxy is less important than helping people.

History and development

The Book of Mormon evolved out of a 2003 meeting between Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the animated television show South Park, and Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, creators of the puppet-filled stage musical Avenue Q. The four men realized that they all wanted to do an irreverent musical about the LDS founder and prophet Joseph Smith and his sacred Book of Mormon, and they immediately decided to work on the project together. Over the following years, the creators researched and wrote the musical whenever their demanding schedules allowed. Marx eventually left the project over creative differences with Parker.

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The actual format of The Book of Mormon remained undecided for a long time as the project progressed; the possibility of making an album was floated, as was a movie. Only at Lopez’s urging did the creators begin workshopping the project for the stage. The hiring of actors and other theater-related issues were new to Parker and Stone; as animators, they were used to the relatively simple and inexpensive process of storyboarding. All told, the creators held half a dozen workshops of varying scale over four years. The last workshop took place in August 2010, after which the creators decided to pull the trigger on producing the show.

Once that choice was made, things moved quickly. Financing was obtained—roughly $11.4 million in investment, though the musical ultimately came well under budget at $9 million. Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre was booked as the venue. Rehearsals began in January, took six weeks, and led directly into previews in late February. The producers first watched the finished production for themselves on March 18, 2011, just six days before opening night.

The version that first made it onto the Eugene O’Neill stage was choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, who also directed the show with Parker. Nicholaw was a late hire, having only been attached to the project in August 2010. The planned director for the previous two years had been Avenue Q’s Jason Moore, but he had left in June after being offered only one-third his customary pay rate. The leading roles of Kevin Price and Arnold Cunningham were performed by Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad, respectively, both of whom had already been playing those parts for some time in the workshops.

Reception and awards

The Book of Mormon was a smash. In its first nine months the show broke the Eugene O’Neill Theater’s weekly box office record a stunning 22 times. The musical later won nine Tony Awards, four Drama Desk Awards, and three Outer Critics Circle Awards. A production began in Chicago in 2012 and then started touring the U.S. in 2013. On March 21, 2013, a West End production of The Book of Mormon opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre, where it won four Laurence Olivier Awards, including for best musical. An Australian tour followed in 2017 and won two Helpmann Awards, also including for best musical.

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Given that Elder Cunningham’s creation of a novel religion has obvious satirical parallels to Smith’s founding of the LDS church, and several songs explicitly ridicule specific tenets of the faith, many have been surprised by the response of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the extremely crude and blasphemous musical. When The Book of Mormon opened on Broadway, the church issued an official statement:

The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.

Rather than hold protests or boycotts, the church embraced the musical’s popularity: it bought ad space in the show’s playbill and launched billboard, bus, and other ad campaigns in the cities in which the show toured. These featured playful slogans such as “The book is always better” and “You’ve seen the play, now read the book.”

By mid-2022 The Book of Mormon had grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, making it one of the most commercially successful musicals of all time. With more than 4,600 performances by the end of 2023, the Broadway production has also been one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.