To follow up on yesterday's belated review of The Book of Mormon, I wanted to tell you about a funny thing that happened after the show. As at most Broadway productions, we were invited to contribute to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS by depositing cash in the buckets that cast members would be holding various exits. When we reached the main floor from our nosebleed seats, I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and made a beeline for Lewis Cleale, who was still in his Joseph Smith costume.
Now, you have to understand that I came to the show in costume. Laura had dug up my old missionary name tag, which I proudly wore together with a white shirt and tie (much to the amusement and/or chagrin of our theatergoing companions). Imagine the confusion and concern of the poor actor, dressed as the founder of Mormonism, as, after a production lampooning the faith, a stout Mormon missionary marches straight up to him. According to my friend Chris Connolly, the man flinched as if I might attack him.
Imagine his relief when all I did was tell him what a great job he'd done as I dropped money into his bucket. Yeah, that was fun.
It used to be that when people would find out I'm a former Mormon, they'd ask me whether or not I watch Big Love and how closely it matches my experience of growing up in Utah. (Answers: "Yes" and "Not much.") Over the past year, though, that has changed. Now they ask whether or not I've seen The Book of Mormon.
The answer to that is yes. In fact, as soon as the Broadway production was announced, Laura and I started making plans to visit New York and see it. With my background, how could we not? We put together a group of friends that included my agent and got tickets for April 9th, about two weeks after the show's official opening. I bought our tickets early enough that it wasn't hard to get seats for a group of eight on our preferred date. But by the time we actually saw it, the hype had revved up to such a wild extent that people were asking us how on earth we'd managed to score tickets.
The Book of Mormon—from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Avenue Q co-creator Robert Lopez—was the most celebrated new musical of the 2011 Broadway season, and it's easy to see why. It has everything an audience in search of some dangerous New York City titillation could ask for—dirty words, blasphemy, violence, Mormons, sexual innuendo, frequently all crammed together into catchy production numbers—all consumable from the relative safety of a plush theater seat. It's been a giant hit with crowds and critics alike, landing nine Tony Awards (including Best Musical), five Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Musical), and who knows how many best-stuff-of-the-year lists. It kicks off a national tour this August, and a Chicago production will take up residence in the Bank of America Theatre this December. People are falling all over themselves to tell you how good it is.
Is it really that good? I don't think so. Did I enjoy it? Yes, to an extent. Was it funny? Yes, to an extent. Was it anything like my experience as a missionary? Yes—but to a very small, almost irrelevant extent.
The Book of Mormon tells the story of Kevin Price (Andrew Rannells), a Mormon youth who dreams of serving as a missionary in Orlando, Florida. Instead, he gets assigned to Uganda with Arnold Cunningham (an irrepressible Josh Gad) as his companion. Elder Cunningham is just about the biggest screw-up ever to pass through the Missionary Training Center, and Elder Price tries to put the best face on both disappointing assignments.
But Uganda turns out to be even more hellish than he could have imagined. The more experienced, longer-serving missionaries have not managed to convert a single soul in that war-ravaged land. Poverty and famine reign supreme. AIDS is rampant, its spread only exacerbated by the belief that it can be cured by having sex with a virgin (which spawns a surfeit of baby-rape jokes). A local warlord rules with a bloody iron fist. And the villagers get through their days by cursing God in no uncertain terms from behind philosophical grins.
Elder Price, depressed, does his best to preach the gospel according to Joseph Smith, but throws in the towel after the warlord, General Butt-Fucking Naked (Brian Tyree Henry), murders a man in front of him. It falls to Elder Cunningham to take over the proselytizing effort. But the well-meaning Cunningham, who didn't pay very close attention in class at the MTC, has never actually read the Book of Mormon, which forces him to invent gospel stories more tailored to the realities of life in Uganda.
The Book of Mormon is, above all else, funny—side-splittingly funny through a couple of long stretches. Okay, I'll say it. I think my first viewing of the South Park movie in a crowded theater was the last time I laughed as hard as I did right up through the show-stopping musical number "Hasa Diga Eebowai," an incredibly profane and blasphemous riff on sunny, reductive ditties like The Lion King's "Hakuna Matata." (On the off-chance you've been living in a cloister for the past twelve months and don't know the translation of "hasa diga eebowai," I won't spoil it for you.)
The songs are mostly terrific too, certainly up to the standards of the past twenty years of Broadway musicals. The production numbers are tuneful and funny, and there are even good laughs to had in the quieter numbers. (A particular favorite of mine is "Baptize Me," a song that very cleverly casts a request for cleansing from sin into the mode of one of those syrupy R&B loss-of-virginity ballads.) And the performances are certainly spirited, especially Josh Gad's in the role of the hapless but well-meaning Elder Cunningham.
But the show suffers in other ways. From a dramatic standpoint, the story's through-line is fractured by the disappearance of Elder Price, the nominal protagonist, through large portions of the second act. (I know that Price's character is meant to skewer the trope of the Broadway hero whose naive confidence enables him to conquer the world, but that doesn't mean it works.) Characters behave in inconsistent ways that undermine the plot—the murderous General Butt-Fucking Naked, for example, who early on is unafraid to shoot an innocent villager in the head or to sodomize a missionary with a holy book, but in the end is cowed by inspirational stories. The violence itself plays more like a blatant attempt to shock than an organic element of the plot, as if a page from a Quentin Tarantino script had been pasted by accident into the book, and introduces an unwelcome tone of reality that sits at odds with the relative sweetness of the rest of the production.
All that is forgivable, but the worst sin The Book of Mormon commits is to grow boring through much of its middle. Somewhere on the way to the muddle that takes Elder Price out of the spotlight, the show just stops being clever. It never exactly stops being funny in a low-level way, but neither the plot nor the jokes rises above a certain bland level of predictability. Oh, so one of the older missionaries is a repressed homosexual? Yawn. So the naive young Nabulungi (Nikki M. James) imagines Salt Lake City as a magical wonderland where the warlords are kind and there's a Red Cross on every corner? Ho hum.
The show catches fire again toward the end, after the miraculous conversion of nearly the entire village catches the attention of the Mormon mission president, who comes to congratulate the local missionaries and is treated to a hilarious production number in which the villagers rehash all the mixed-up misconceptions Elder Cunningham has taught them about the Book of Mormon. Some of this material verges on the racist, but The Book of Mormon is ultimately saved, if not redeemed, by the villagers' innate understanding that they are not being taught literal truth but rather a series of parables intended to help them process and deal with the harsh realities of their daily existence.
This final message about religion's palliative effects in a grim world did enable me to leave the theater with a smile on my face, but I still can't shake my conviction that The Book of Mormon is hardly the flawless gem so many people seem to think it is. Still, I can't deny that I had a lot of fun watching it, and the funny parts are so funny that most theatergoers will probably forgive the parts that drag.
All right, so that's my review of the production itself. But how accurately does it reflect the realities of Mormonism, and of the lives of Mormon missionaries? Well ... not all that well.
Don't get me wrong. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done their research, at least into Mormon history and doctrine, as two rather funny numbers ("All American Prophet" and "I Believe") amply demonstrate. They've come a long way from the days of Orgazmo, their 1998 film about a Mormon missionary who becomes an accidental porn star, which was wall-to-wall stupid-funny but didn't have the glimmerings of a first clue about Mormon teachings or missionary life.
They had a much better handle on things Mormon by the time they made the infamous "All About Mormons" episode of South Park in 2003, which I gave high marks for the accuracy of its portrayal of the way the church presents its own history. But in the interim Parker and Stone have only somewhat improved their knowledge of the way missions work.
One of the things they get right, which matched my experience to a scary degree, is the crushing sense being exiled to a strange land for a period of time that seems so long it may as well be forever. They also nail the feeling of despair that comes from being saddled with a companion not of your choosing who doesn't share your same work ethic.
But the mechanics of missionary life they get mostly wrong. "Two by Two," for instance, the song in which the young elders at the Missionary Training Center get their assignments, makes for a fun production number, but is based on fantasy. In reality, missionaries learn where in the world they'll be send months before they report to the MTC. They also are not normally assigned to be companions with other greenies, and certainly aren't assigned to just one companion for the full duration of their missions. New missionaries get more experienced elders as their first companions in the field, and their companions rotate every two or three months. (I had over a dozen different companions myself over the course of my mission.) And no missionary would ever be allowed to leave the MTC with as non-existent a grasp of the basics of Mormon theology as Elder Cunningham demonstrates.
Most wrong of all, though, is Elder Price's desire to serve his mission in Orlando. I have no doubt that plenty of lazy young men, hoping for two cushy years, have no greater ambition than to serve an English-speaking mission in a subtropical tourist destination, but that in no way reflects the thinking of young Mormons with ambitions to set the world on fire with their preaching. No, the glory-seekers among us (myself included) hoped for the most difficult assignments in the most exotic locales imaginable. Central America. Southeast Asia. Communist Russia (which was rumored to soon be opening to missionaries at the time I was putting my application papers in). These were the places we wanted to go. An elder as ambitious as Price would have been beside himself to get a calling to Uganda.
But if it sounds like I'm calling out the creators of The Book of Mormon for sloppiness, I'm really not. The reality of Mormonism is almost incidental to the show, which is not actually about Mormonism. Instead Mormonism is a proxy for religion itself, a safe choice for giving adherents of other faiths room to distance themselves from any critiques leveled in the production, which really aren't very deep. I can't even call The Book of Mormon a black comedy because in the end it doesn't have the conviction of its meanness. It has no interest in skewering the religious impulse, or in pushing its ideas to any absurd dark extreme. It lands sunny-side up, and is satisfied with the status quo. This, despite the lip service to naughtiness and edginess, makes The Book of Mormon a supremely conservative production, and thus perfect for Broadway success.
If I had to sum my opinion up in one sentence, I say that The Book of Mormon, while quite funny and entertaining, did not offend me nearly enough.
As a fan of the band The Negro Problem, I was delighted to pick up the following throwaway tidbit from a New Yorker blog post by John Colapinto:
{Spike] Lee's next excursion into the question of race in America is his filmed version of "Passing Strange," the remarkable musical by [Negro Problem leader] Stew. I watched Lee shooting this production last June, in the Belasco Theatre in New York. The movie will be released, Lee tells me, in late August, at the IFC Center, in Manhattan. [full post]
I learn from Stew's website that it's also been picked up by PBS for a Great Performances airing in 2010, and possibly will have a theatrical run this fall.
Having missed the run of Passing Strange in New York, I'm glad there are going to be multiple opportunites to see it.
I busted a gut watching Marc Shaiman's short revue "Prop 8: The Musical." Among the many celebrity cameos herein, my favorite is Jack Black's, who may be my favorite Jesus since Graham Chapman didn't play him.
For all you sci-fi musical theater fans—and you know you're out there!—I thought I'd share this official press release about The Last Starfighter: The Musical I received from Skip Kennon...
OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE August 28, 2007
Tony Award winner Chuck Cooper and Broadway veteran Adinah Alexander join cast of THE LAST STARFIGHTER at NYMF
THE NEW YORK MUSICAL THEATRE FESTIVAL,
STARFIGHTER ONSTAGE, LLC, and
JULIE MILLER — Producer
present
"THE LAST STARFIGHTER"
Music and Lyrics by SKIP KENNON.
Book by FRED LANDAU.
Directed by ELIZABETH LUCAS
Choreography by DAVID EGGERS
THE LAST STARFIGHTER is pleased to announce that Tony Award Winner CHUCK COOPER and Broadway veteran ADINAH ALEXANDER have joined the cast of The Last Starfighter at NYMF.
Chuck Cooper won the Tony Award for his performance in The Life, and has been part of many Broadway casts including Caroline, or Change; Chicago; Lennon; Passion; and Getting Away With Murder. Adinah Alexander was part of the original Broadway casts of The Wedding Singer; Wicked; Urban Cowboy; and Parade.
Chuck Cooper will play Otis Wright, a character similar to the Stage Manager in Our Town, genially guiding the musical's audience through the day-to-day activities in an idyllic town, but with an intergalactic twist. Adinah Alexander will play Mrs. Miriam Rogan, the manager of Starlite Starbrite Trailer Park, mother of title character Alex Rogan, holding down more jobs than she can handle while being the confidante for Alex's cherished girlfriend Maggie.
Joining CHUCK COOPER and ADINAH ALEXANDER in The Last Starfighter are previously announced cast members JOSEPH KOLINSKI (Titanic, Les Miserables, Dance A Little Closer, Brigadoon, A Christmas Carol) as Centauri -- the role played by Robert Preston in the 1984 film, DANNY BINSTOCK (High School Musical at NSMT; Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare Theatre Co.; My Fair Lady At Signature Theater) as title character Alex Rogan, JANET CARROLL (Aunt March in Little Women) as Granny, TOM TREADWELL (the 20th anniversary Broadway revival of Annie) as Rylan leader Enduran, MARY ELLEN ASHLEY (whose many credits start with the ORIGINAL Broadway Annie Get Your Gun) as Elaine, MICHAEL CONE (Broadway's La Boheme, Rags, Brigadoon, A Christmas Carol) as Hugh, JESSE J.P. JOHNSON (a standout as Luke in the Altar Boyz tour) as Marty, JONATHAN RICHARD SANDLER (Nat’l Tour of Dr. Dolittle) as Jerry, LAUREN MARCUS (Hello, Dolly at Paper Mill Playhouse; Our Town at Provincetown Playhouse) as Darlene, RYAN JESSE as Blake and the villain Zur, NATALIE HALL as Jenny, SEAN MONTGOMERY as Toby, and JESSICA BLAIR as Lynn.
From JONATHAN BETUEL’s screenplay for the beloved 1980s sci-fi film comes the cosmically entertaining romantic musical fantasy THE LAST STARFIGHTER. It’s Spring 1983 in a Sierra Nevada trailer park. High school senior Alex Rogan’s hardworking, unrewarded life takes an unexpected turn when he breaks a video game record and is spirited away by the game’s inventor, the alien huckster Centauri, to fight for the Star League in a faraway galaxy. Centauri leaves behind Beta, a body double droid of Alex, to cover Alex’s absence with his mother, brother and beloved girlfriend Maggie while Alex is off fighting the evil Zur and the Ko-dan Armada. Beta’s comic mishaps on Earth with Maggie and the neighbors in the trailer park, and shape-shifting alien assassins in pursuit of Alex on his home turf, alternate with Alex’s heroic starfighter achievements. Alex must reach inside himself to discover his true potential – the universe and his life depend on it!
Composer/Lyricist SKIP KENNON wrote the music for the one-man musical HERRINGBONE (June 2007 at Williamstown starring B.D. Wong, Playwrights Horizons, Hartford Stage starring Joel Grey, Edinburgh Festival, Prince Music Theater, St. Nicholas Theater) and for the one-act AFTERNOON TEA (INTAR, August 2007 at 59E59); and the music and lyrics for BLANCO (Goodspeed, National Music Theater Network), FEATHERTOP (WPA Theater, Pennsylvania Stage Co.), and TIME AND AGAIN (Manhattan Theatre Club, Old Globe, O’Neill Center).
Book Writer FRED LANDAU is a member of BMI and an alumnus of the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. He wrote the book and score for THE HAPPIEST OF TIMES, which was seen in production at New York’s Triangle Theater and as part of BMI’s Festival of Musicals in Miniature, as well as in workshop presentations at ASCAP and Circle Rep.
Director ELIZABETH LUCAS has previously directed two new musicals for NYMF, CAPTAIN GRAVY'S WAVY NAVY and THE VIEW FROM HERE, and is currently directing two feature films, the rock movie musical CLEAR BLUE TUESDAY and the teen slasher RED HOOK. Her multi-award-winning short musical film ISABELLA RICO has appeared in 33 festivals worldwide.
Choreographer DAVID EGGERS can currently be seen on Broadway in the cast of CURTAINS, and is also the Dance Captain for that show. David was previously Dance Captain for the recent Roundabout revival of THE PAJAMA GAME, and the Broadway show THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE.
The design team includes lighting design by HERRICK GOLDMAN and costume design by MARK RICHARD CASWELL. Technical Director is KEITH TRUAX. Production Manager is JULIE MILLER. Casting is by MICHAEL CASSARA CASTING. JULIE MILLER is the Producer.
"THE LAST STARFIGHTER" is an official selection of the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival.
THE LAST STARFIGHTER IS AN OFFICIAL SELECTION OF THE 2007 NEW YORK MUSICAL THEATRE FESTIVAL.
NYMF Publicity Contact:
Charlie Siedenburg / Sam Rudy Media Relations (212) 221-8466
Now in its 4th year, The New York Musical Theatre Festival is the largest musical theatre event in America. NYMF premiered 99 new musicals during its first three seasons, with more than a dozen of these shows transferring to successful off-Broadway and regional productions. Hailed as "the Sundance of Musical Theatre," NYMF is widely regarded as the premier source for new material and talent discovery.
NYMF is a flagship program of The National Music Theater Network, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, and is presented by BroadwayWorld.com in association with amNewYork, Ars Nova, GSD Productions, King Displays, Panasonic Astrovision, Playbill, Variety Magazine and Verizon Wireless, and is proudly supported by Backstage, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Broadway Bullet, BroadwayBox.com, BroadwayInsider.com, Choice Signs, City Theatricals, Frank & Camille’s Fine Pianos, HX Magazine, Port Authority of NY and NJ, Seasons of Savings, Tekserve, TheatreMania.com, TheMENevent, Virgin Megastore and Wybron. NYMF is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
THE LAST STARFIGHTER Performance Schedule at NYMF:
(All performances at The Theater at St. Clements, 46th St btwn 9th and 10th Aves)
Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 8:00pm
Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 1:00pm
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 9:00pm
Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 1:00pm
Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 9:00pm
Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 4:00pm
Tickets are $20 and may be purchased online at http://www.nymf.org/Show-698.html
Or by telephone at (212) 352-3101.
Single ticket sales begin on September 1st.
As at most Broadway productions, we were invited to contribute to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS by depositing cash in the buckets that cast members would be holding various exits. When we reached the main floor from our nosebleed seats, I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and made a beeline for Lewis Cleale, who was still in his Joseph Smith costume.
It has everything an audience in search of some dangerous New York City titillation could ask for—dirty words, blasphemy, violence, Mormons, sexual innuendo, frequently all crammed together into catchy production numbers—all consumable from the relative safety of a plush theater seat. It's been a giant hit with crowds and critics alike, landing nine Tony Awards (including Best Musical), five Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Musical), and who knows how many best-stuff-of-the-year lists. It kicks off a national tour this August, and a Chicago production will take up residence in the Bank of America Theatre this December. People are falling all over themselves to tell you how good it is.
(A particular favorite of mine is "
But in the interim Parker and Stone have only somewhat improved their knowledge of the way missions work.