Currently running at The Prince of Wales Theatre, London.
Jared Gertner (left) and Gavin Creel in The Book of Mormon. Picture: Johan Persson
Thank God for The Book of Mormon. Not only is it performing miracles at the box office – recently breaking records by taking £2.1 million in a single day – this original musical also offers a shining beacon in a market saturated with film remakes. No wonder everyone views it as the Second Coming; I’d say Amen.
For while expectation is a dangerous thing the musical shows redemption for the modern musical is at hand, albeit in an often gapingly distasteful form.
Songs about raping babies, clitoris mutilation and joyously proclaiming FU to God sail perilously close to the wind. While this irreverence is often entertainingly subversive, at times it dampens the experience and feels juvenile. In other ways, however, the piece is terribly conventional, and it is in this tension that its cleverness is revealed. Slick, funny and full of barnstorming numbers this satirical assault is also a buddy movie at heart and a secular clarion call for a better tomorrow.
As always with writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone no one is safe from ridicule, an egalitarian attitude that softens their acidic tongue. Religion comes in for a hefty beating but so too does the First World’s attitudes to the Third World. Perhaps most cleverly the musical format itself gets some gentle teasing – “Africa isn’t like The Lion King at all!” Elder Price cries to a guffawing audience.
Honour Bayes
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