Broadway opens its front door.

Hello! Have you heard of the Book of Mormon? Of course you have. It’s the sequel to the New Testament dug up by a man named Joseph Smith in upstate New York in 1827. Smith said an angel named Moroni appeared to him and told him where the plates upon which the Book of Mormon is based were located. No one else ever saw Moroni, and no one else ever saw the plates, but eh, it seemed legit. The Book of Mormon lead to Mormonism, and there are now more than 150 million copies of the Book of Mormon in circulation today. That’s almost 10 Books of Mormon for every actual Mormon in the world.

Have you heard of The Book of Mormon? Of course you have. It’s the Broadway play from 2011 created by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez. The Book of Mormon took seven years to hit Broadway after Parker and Stone met Lopez, but since its premiere, millions of people have seen it across the world. In fact, The Book of Mormon is one of the longest-running Broadway shows of all time[1], and one of the most successful, having grossed over $540 million as of 2018[2]. The Book of Mormon’s original Broadway cast recording charted at third on the Billboard 200 list, the highest ranking for a Broadway album in over 40 years, and it earned nine Tony awards, including Best Musical.

The Book of Mormon might have changed your life. The Book of Mormon changed Broadway. This chapter is mostly going to be about the second thing.

Broadway is one of the last places in pop culture that really feels like it has high barriers of entry. There’s a lot of people who just don’t or can’t go see a show. Culturally, theater has always been sort of insular: To this day, it’s still the place for high-school weirdos and, in adulthood, the upper class of American society[3]. While some shows penetrate the broader zeitgeist with their soundtracks or characters—we’ll cite some examples later—live theater retains a visibility and access problem it’s had for pretty much its entire existence. Broadway is exclusive.

So for The Book of Mormon to exist in such a space feels like a small mistake. If you look at The Book of Mormon’s story, it seems like nothing you’d see on a Broadway stage. Two young Mormon missionaries with dreams of spreading the word of Joseph Smith are plunked down in AIDS-ravaged, war-torn Uganda, and though they begin their work among the locals as optimistic and bright-eyed youths, the village’s myriad struggles—poverty, war, sexual assault, disease, famine, scrotum-dwelling maggots—reduce the pair to cynical skeptics as their teachings are rendered toothless and ineffective. For one of the missionaries, Elder Price, this leads to a crisis of faith, and for another, Elder Cunningham, it leads to a deeper look at the religion he didn’t know much about to begin with[4].

Along the way, there’s a Spooky Mormon Hell Dream and a song about suppressing your sexuality and in Act II someone has the Book of Mormon shoved up their butthole, but hey, details, details.

Broadway has connotations as the place for chin-up, down-the-bridge-of-your-nose art. It’s stuffy. The Book of Mormon has a character named General Butt Fucking Naked. It has a song that links the rite of baptism to taking someone’s virginity[5]. It appropriates African culture on purpose, and then makes fun of itself for doing so, and then spends its whole runtime walking a tightrope between cracking jokes about the cultural deficit of third-world countries and the pretentiousness of white people entering into those third-world countries. It’s not at all politically correct. It’s entirely tasteless. It’s one of the first Broadway shows in modern memory to make the whole venue and form of the theater feel like it could be for everyone.

When The Book of Mormon premiered in 2011, attempts to “popularize” Broadway or take theater into the mainstream had largely been failures. The most infamous example is 2010’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, an ill-fated IP grab in the wake of Sam Raimi’s successful film trilogy about the superhero. The Spider-Man musical was one of the most expensive Broadway productions in history—the budget hit $75 million—but its pricey stunts and effects weren’t as well-considered as you would hope, to say the least. Numerous stunt performers and actors suffered injuries during rehearsals and previews, with the web-swinging choreography and aerial combat sequences hospitalizing six people after various falls (one actor plummeted over 20 feet when they weren’t properly attached to a safety harness), concussions, broken bones, fractured vertebrae, and what one report just describes as “leg trauma.” After numerous fits and starts, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark[6] was cancelled in 2014, a Broadway mercy killing[7].

Other Book of Mormon contemporaries that aimed for the beyond-Broadway masses included an adaptation of Green Day’s American Idiot (ran for about a year), Legally Blonde (18 months on Broadway before its exit lead to countless cringey high-school adaptations[8]), Billy Elliott the Musical (?), the regrettable Shrek the Musical, and even an adaptation of the Will Ferrell Elf movie. Broadway’s long been in the business of co-opting known quantities to try and sell tickets—look no further than the countless iterations of The Producers or Spring Awakening—but at the turn of the decade, this trend was in a particularly odd place[9].

Somehow, amid this trend, The Book of Mormon’s originality shone even brighter. The anti-progressive tone and offensive underpinnings would seem prime to derail it in the midst of the decade’s tolerance-heavy cultural tip-toeing. And yet, it was a smash precisely because of all these things. Maybe it makes more sense than you want to admit given Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s record on South Park, but moreover, these two guys are actually veterans of musical theater.

Parker and Stone wrote The Book of Mormon with Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez, a natural marriage of sensibilities, but they hardly needed a shepherd for the Broadway scene. In fact, Parker and Stone’s debut film was called Cannibal! The Musical![10], and their feature-length South Park film included several songs as well. So while the temptation is to pit them and Lopez as a trio of Broadway party-crashers, that’s not quite the case. What makes them unique, and what made Mormon unique, was how they didn’t adapt or change their sense of humor to fit what Broadway conventions looked like. The Book of Mormon is, essentially, an episode of South Park on the stage[11].

But while that in turn prompts the expectation that The Book of Mormon would be one long roast of religion, that isn’t the case, either. Yes, the show indeed mines humor from Mormon theology—“I believe that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri!” Elder Price belts during the show’s climactic musical number—but nonetheless the story finds a delicate balance between teasing Mormonism and affirming the faith, earnestness, and selflessness of the Mormon people. As Matt Stone once said: The Book of Mormon is “an atheist’s love letter to religion.” The show doesn’t endorse Mormonism, but it does affirm belief.

And that’s where The Book of Mormon finally feels like it makes sense among its peers on Broadway. Through all the songs about cursing God (“Hasa Diga Eebowai”) and jovially burying past trauma (“Turn It Off”) and imagining a Mormon hell occupied by Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hitler, and Johnnie Cochran (“Spooky Mormon Hell Dream”)[12], The Book of Mormon contains an idealistic attitude toward good-intentioned, service-oriented faith. It doesn’t endorse Mormonism or any one particular religion, but it ends with a surprising and sweet message about all the good that can come out of religion, particularly those that practice peace, service, and inclusivity.

It’s a natural idea to find a home on Broadway, which despite its lack of populism has long been the cultural haven for social outcasts, rejects, and in theory, the marginalized. The stereotype of the oppressed theater geek still somewhat rings true, after all, even if the modern social scene at a typical high school isn’t reaching Glee levels of oppression or ridicule. Drama is still a niche interest and a special-interest club. It’s not usually where the popular or cool kids go, and after graduation, it’s a home for the romantic idealists rather than the career-driven professionals. Theater still has that free-spirit energy you either loved or hated as a kid, and what is The Book of Mormon about if not a pair of rigid thinkers who, through exposure to the world beyond Salt Lake City, finally find that sense of freedom?

If The Book of Mormon has any shortcomings, it’s that its ideals are a little too easy to swallow given the gleeful anarchy they’re presented in. As rebellious and anti-establishment as the show is in tone and content, the end note doesn’t challenge the audience to think anything different about faith or religion or service. That’s probably why the show found the mainstream—religion being one of those “don’t discuss at the dinner table” topics—but the move blunts The Book of Mormon just a bit. It’s like a sword with a fine-honed blade but a dull point.

At the same time, it’s hard to fault Mormon for its lack of conviction. It had to nudge the boundaries of provocation so other, more laser-focused Broadway shows could run, the greatest of which in the past decade is Hamilton. If there’s any show that matches Mormon’s general pervasiveness and impact in the public consciousness, it’s Hamilton, a show that not only garnered widespread attention and acclaim, but went on to make stars of its cast in a way The Book of Mormon never quite did[13].

If The Book of Mormon used a punk kid’s slingshot to zing pebbles into the Broadway pool, Hamilton did away with the gadgetry and just dropped a boulder into the water. It’s a more traditionally presented show, but its waves reach all the way to the proverbial shore. Hamilton’s combination of American hip hop and American history was an organic revelation, its cross-racial casting casually profound, and its examinations of American ambition, soul, patriotism, and treachery didn’t just have the soaring capital-f Feeling that Broadway loves to thrust before an audience, but also the conviction and strength of messaging that not even the balls-out Book of Mormon could muster.

Hamilton’s revolutions—the unexpected parties involved, the at-first strange but later perfect blend of style and medium, the brow-raising insights into a subject most people took for granted—all have precedence in The Book of Mormon, and thus the two shows have an unusual kinship that illuminates both in sharper detail. Hamilton’s intricate raps and choreography demonstrate a Broadway-esque devotion to artistry that The Book of Mormon brushes aside in favor of a killer joke. The Book of Mormon’s cavalier attitude toward race, creed, and sexuality is almost post-modern in its progressivism opposite Hamilton’s bold, noticeable, statement-making advancements in representation. One’s a class clown who charmed their way among the elite, and the other’s a class president who galvanized their peers on a platform of imaginative progress. Mormon said anyone could make a show about anything. Hamilton said a show could say anything and be accepted for it.

In the 2010s, Broadway’s doors opened just a little bit wider, and now theaters are more diverse, convicted, and forward-thinking than ever. The medium still isn’t exactly mainstream—most people in America haven’t seen The Book of Mormon or Hamilton[14]—but as more types of people appear onstage and in production roles, more efforts will be made to bring different types of people into the audience. The solution to Broadway’s populism problem could be to find more Trey Parkers, Matt Stones, and Lin-Manuel Mirandas[15] to build bridges between New York’s theater district and the rest of the country, be it to the people who watch Comedy Central late at night or the Puerto Rican immigrants in Washington Heights or the folks ringing doorbells in Salt Lake City. The Book of Mormon might not believe the text at its center, but it does believe in missionaries. Thank goodness it had the boldness and gall to send them forth. Hello!

[1] It’s 14th-longest, in fact. Just a few hundred performances behind Ms. Saigon for the 13th spot. It reached #14 in July 2019 when it surpassed 42ng Street with its 3,487th performance.

[2] This comes against just a $10 million budget, which on the scale  of major Broadway productions is actually quite cheap.

[3] Plus everyone’s grandmother, it seems. Maybe that’s the same thing.

[4] This dogmatic examination results in one of the show’s best running gags, in which Elder Cunningham begins making things up about Mormonism on the fly while preaching to the Ugandan natives. Details of Cunningham’s version of Mormonism include: A law that decrees having sex with a frog will cure you of AIDS, Boba Fett working as a mercenary for Jesus Christ, and God turning Brigham Young’s nose into a clitoris for circumcising his daughter. The song that reveals all these blasphemies also has a part in which Joseph Smith dies from dysentery, complete with bloody-stool choreography.

[5] Lyrics: “And I'll make her beg for more (Ooh) / As I wash her free of sin / And it'll be so good / She'll want me to baptize her again (Baptize me again)!”

[6] And WTF is this title, anyway?

[7] One tiny little tidbit about this show: The cast was a revolving door of actors who who bought in to the hype of the production and then promptly nope-d the fuck out, but one such cast member was True Blood and Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood, who briefly occupied the role of Mary Jane Watson in 2010 before she, too, bailed on the doomed production for her own safety.

[8] Call me traditional, but teenage girls should not be singing and performing the “bend and snap” in front of their parents and peers.

[9] Today, Broadway is much more successful at this strategy, though their choices still look strange on paper. Tina Fey’s production of Mean Girls grabbed the torch from Legally Blonde, but we also had a Spongebob Squarepants musical, a show based on the 80s movie Heathers, and a Matilda musical. Of course, there’s also the polarizing and massive Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but at the risk of derailing this entire chapter, best to just call that one “a choice” and move along.

[10] Trey Parker starred and directed this movie on a budget of about $70,000 while still a student at UC-Boulder. Matt Stone is billed third among the cast. The movie’s based loosely on the true story of Alfred Packer, who in 1873 lead an expedition from Utah to Colorado that ended with his five companions dead and partially eaten. You know, classic comedy stuff.

[11] South Park made fun of Mormonism a couple times before The Book of Mormon. In one episode, Joseph Smith fights magician David Blaine. In another episode, Satan declares that only Mormons end up in heaven.

[12] Jesus shows up in hell, too, just to call Elder Price a dick for abandoning Elder Cunningham. Jesus might also stick around to join the orgy of demons and hellspawn, but it’s hard to say for sure—there’s a lot to look at on the stage during this part of the show, the least of which isn’t the long-armed Satan receiving oral sex from Hitler.

[13] The most famous people to go through The Book of Mormon are Josh Gad, who played Elder Cunningham for the show’s original run, Ben Platt, who played Elder Price for the second national tour in 2012, Michael Potts, who played Mafala Hatimbi (though you know him better as Brother Mouzone on The Wire), and—maybe best of all—Brian Tyree Henry, the  General of the original cast. The General is a pretty limited part in Mormon, but it’s fun to imagine Henry’s incredible expressiveness in the role. He deploys his face to great effect on FX’s Atlanta now.

[14] Come to think of it, Americans are much more likely to see a musical at a movie theater than on an actual Broadway stage. La La Land, The Les Miserables, The Greatest Showman, and the Disney live-action remakes have all gone gangbusters at the domestic box office. Popular culture in the literal sense of the phrase loves musicals, which perhaps adds a touch of hope to the notion that one day stage musicals can reach more people than they do now.

[15] The creator of Hamilton, though you probably knew that already.