Let’s be honest here, with a show like “The Book of Mormon” you are already walking in expecting to see profanity, crudeness and a more than healthy amount of offensiveness. The show is, after all, created by the same diabolically devious minds behind “South Park:” Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone. The show’s biggest weapon is its shock value, but how shocking can such a value really be when people are turned toward you already salivating, with heaving bosoms, to be shocked? The answer lies in the progressively more breathier gasps of the elderly lady feasting her sensibilities of this atrocity next to me last Wednesday at the Overture Center.
It’s no surprise that the show has bagged nine Tony awards and you’ll nod along because the satire genius of this production is common knowledge now. But what never gets mentioned is the fact that “The Book of Mormon” also has charm. It is a sweet and yet undeniably foul charm that sneaks up on you and perhaps is its biggest saving grace, amidst the open season on Mormonism, Christianity, race, homosexuality and many other things. And this very inappropriate charm is what the opening number of this show pulls you in by: with all the young Mormon missionaries ringing doorbells and eagerly pressing upon you their book, not unlike a virginity stricken 16-year-old boy, hoping someone would let them save their soul.
Imagine your two most quintessential 19-year-old boy cliches—an all American boy-next-door charmer and an awkward as hell delusional follower—and then have their ultimate dream be to baptize the world of their sins into Mormons. These dewy-eyed missionaries find themselves in the last place they want to be, Uganda. In stark contrast to their hopes of people wanting their souls to be saved and tirades of “Hakuna Matata;” people here are contemplating ways to ward off AIDS (which will later include doing the unspeakable with a frog, and by the unspeakable I do mean bumping uglies), escaping warlords with names too foul to print and flipping the bird to a God who has yet to make an appearance. My favorite, however, was the guy who sporadically announced the maggots in his scrotum by belting it out majestically in the end.
But the show has layers. Yes on one hand it is very obviously—slap you in the face obvious really—mocking the Mormon religion, its teachings and beliefs about many modern and relevant things. At one point the show laughs at the expense of the characters' denial of many things in a song that tells you to “Turn it off”—homosexuality, doubts about God, sadness, tragedy—with a “nifty little Mormon trick” of being almost Stepford or just maniacally joyful in nature. It also however, in its over the top exuberance, mocks everything that is Broadway. It drags out dark elements of these things by the tip of their carcasses and then embraces the ridiculousness of it all by dancing around said carcasses with sunny melodies. Is there anything better than to witness irony simmering under blasphemous hilarity?
Everything about this show is a farce in a way and that is how it was meant to be really. Some might say that there is an issue of sacrilege as it specifically employs and targets the very foundation of the Mormon Church. But what the writers attempted to do there is shed light on the bizarreness of all elements of mythology from a certain angle. These traditions and rituals that are tied in the very fabric of who we are and that support us in navigating our daily lives and even death are laughably absurd when just taken a moment to think about. That is exactly what also lends them their gloriousness and majesty.
The two young Mormons do go on to save the people of that little village, as was expected, however they do it by employing stories of Jesus at the Death Star and Evoks added into the mix as well. One might say that is just further hilarity added at the expense of calling it all ridiculous. But it could also be a deeper insight into believing what makes sense to you, and despite the lack of decorum—decorum is for fools, fools!—in such a lesson at all, that’s what I chose to see it as.
