An original story rather than an adaptation, The Book of Mormon by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez won 9 Tony Awards in 2011, including Best Musical.
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The collaboration began in 2003, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone went to see Avenue Q and introduced themselves to its co-composer, Robert Lopez. It took roughly eight years from that meeting to opening night, with workshops and a first staged reading in 2008 along the way — an unusually long gestation for a comedy, and the reason the show is far more carefully built than its reputation implies.
The crucial decision was musical rather than satirical. Lopez writes the score straight, in the idiom of the mid-century book musical, and the comedy comes from the gap between the form and the content. The opening number is a Music Man-style ensemble of doorbells; the protagonist's declaration of faith is shaped exactly like a Rodgers and Hammerstein 'I want' song and arrives at exactly the point in the evening one would expect. Casey Nicholaw's choreography is likewise entirely sincere. Nothing on stage is winking, which is what makes the material land.
It opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in March 2011 and took nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Original Score and Best Direction, along with a Grammy for its cast album the following year. Nikki M. James won for featured actress as Nabulungi, the role that carries most of the show's actual feeling.
The expectation is a demolition of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What the show is closer to is an argument that a religion's factual claims matter less than what its believers do with them — a position it reaches by way of a great many jokes about dysentery. The Church's own response was to buy advertising space in the playbill, and its statement, that the production might entertain for an evening while the book itself would change lives, has aged into one of the better pieces of institutional counter-programming in the theatre's history.
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The Book of Mormon is an American musical comedy with music, lyrics, and book by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone. The story follows two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as they attempt to preach the faith to the inhabitants of a remote Ugandan village. The earnest young men are challenged by the lack of interest from the locals, who are distracted by more pressing issues such as HIV/AIDS, famine, and oppression by the local warlord.
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