Parker, Lopez and Stone's The Book of Mormon

Brian Granger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429682070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

' Hasa Diga Eebowai '

In 2011, a musical full of curse words and Mormon missionaries swept that year's Tony Awards and was praised as a triumphant return of the American musical. This book explores the inherent achievements (and failures) of The Book of Mormon —one of the most ambitious, and problematic, musicals to achieve widespread success. The creative team members—Matt Parker, Trey Stone and composer Robert Lopez—were collectively known for their aggressive use of taboo subjects and crude, punchy humor. Using the metaphor of boxing, Granger explores the metaphorical punches the trio delivers and ruminates over the less-discussed ideological wounds that their style of shock absurdism might leave behind.

This careful examination of where The Book of Mormon succeeds and fails is sure to challenge discussion of our understanding of musical comedy and our appreciation for this cultural landmark in theatre.

Chapter 1

Tradition versus originality

Musical theater’s titleholder and its number-one challenger (a win)

Something unusual and worth unpacking, especially considering Parker, Lopez and Stone’s prior history as cultural pugilists, was the way the notion of tradition kept surfacing in most of the reviews as the least controversial but most emphatic, praise-worthy aspect of TBOM. People toss around the word ‘tradition’ as if the term is a blanket statement or unspoken certification of goodness, a guarantee of awesomeness. Broadway, and musical theater in general, has a history that is over one hundred years old. There’s a lot of past in that past, and lots of traditions—not all of them awesome (which I will say more about in Chapter 3).

Interrogating what is meant by tradition in the Broadway musical is not done here to level criticisms against TBOM’s proximity to or distance from those values, or against any reader’s investment in something they deem traditional. Discussing tradition is essential to understanding the first major fight round that Parker, Lopez and Stone win in the metaphorical tournament that is contemporary popular culture. The ‘versus’ in this chapter’s title is not meant to suggest that the musical champions one quality over the other, but to indicate that it is within the inevitable tension between these two qualities (the ‘fight,’ as it were) where the creative team locates (and makes fully legible) this show. Thus, this chapter begins my ringside commentary on Parker, Lopez and Stone’s musical The Book of Mormon by exploring their first, important achievement in the musical: the confrontation of tradition and originality.

I think tradition in American musical theater means four distinct but overlapping qualities. It is obviously a temporal marker, a sign of nostalgia for the mid-century and its familiar cultural ideas about politics, economics, race, sex, religion, community and civic duty that mass media at that time circulated and championed. Those cultural ideas are embedded in the methods and works of musical theater from the mid-twentieth century to the mid-1970s, anchored by the prodigious output of genre-shaping and trope-creating works by the musical writing duo Rodgers and Hammerstein, as well as by their enterprising, brilliant and predominately Jewish American contemporaries like Jerome Kern and others. In other words, tradition means ‘old-fashioned,’ relative to all the new developments in the genre since the mid-1970s, and in TBOM this is immediately evident in moments like the ensemble tap-dancing that occurs in the number ‘Turn It Off.’

People often describe TBOM as ‘pleasurable,’ and this is actually an umbrella term that masks the three other qualities constituting ‘tradition’ in musical theater parlance. So, first, tradition is the nostalgia of the familiar. Second, tradition as something pleasurable means the presence of catchy songs, with melodies and/or rhythms (and, with only slightly less importance, clever lyrics) that are easy to sing/hum and remember, marking the show as ‘tuneful.’ TBOM’s score is certainly full of engaging tunes. Third, traditional as something pleasurable means a sense of wholesomeness, which I would loosely define as a sense that mainstream community values are being upheld. This means no discussions or depictions of drug use or sexual intercourse for the characters, particularly the youth—something TBOM accomplishes. It can also mean no direct discussions or depictions of culturally or communally taboo topics—and this is an aspect where public reception of TBOM is divided, but where critical comment on the show usually lives. Part of the reason for this is that American musical theater has historically been marketed and thus viewed by the populace (with some important exceptions) as a ‘family’ entertainment, so the basic elements of a good musical need, for many citizens, to be safe for a family’s often multigenerational consumption. Fourth, tradition as something pleasurable means a sense that the show delivers a message that is happy. The stereotypical assumption about Broadway audiences is they perceive a ‘good’ or well-done musical to be one that ends on an upbeat, inspirational note. In any event, these are the four qualities—familiar, catchy, wholesome and happy—that are specifically embedded in the historic and current use of the term ‘tradition’ when it comes up in public discourse and in most scholarship on musical theater. Before exploring some of the most inventive ways Parker, Lopez and Stone blend this composite sense of tradition with their satirically punchy originality, it’s helpful to look at the one moment in The Book of Mormon, above all others, where all four of the defining qualities of tradition are fully demonstrated. This moment is regarded by both reviewers and the creative team members themselves as capturing the heart of the entire show—Nabulungi’s solo number, ‘Sal Tlay Ka Siti.’ Understanding how the song is structured and placed within the plot action reveals the wisdom in Parker, Lopez and Stone’s construction of what is the most traditional musical theater number in TBOM.

Before she sings her solo, we first come to understand Nabulungi as the ingenue of the show. She is the only major female character we are introduced to in the musical, the most prominent member of the new community the young missionary men have joined and the only female apparently of the same age as the young men, for her father threatens them about making advances on her when he meets them. It seems likely, then, when she is introduced, that some romantic tension between her and one, or both, of the sworn-to-chastity men could emerge. This familiar ‘boy-meets-girl’ trope of traditional musical comedy is hinted at when, in the Act One scene that follows the young men’s arrival to the Ugandan village, we see Mafala’s daughter Nabulungi escorting the two missionaries by herself (unchaperoned in their presence) through the city streets to the intimate space of their assigned living quarters.

As Act One continues, we begin to see that Nabulungi has been living in abusive circumstances in her village, where the threat of violence against her is ever-present—a musical theater plot tradition that aligns her with other embattled ingenues like Julie (Carousel, 1954), Cinderella (Cinderella, 1957), Audrey (Little Shop of Horrors, 1982), Celie (The Color Purple, 2004), Jenna (Waitress, 2016), Tina (Tina: The Tina Tuner Musical, 2018) and other lead female characters. Mafala, the Ugandan who first greets the Mormon missionaries upon their arrival and formally welcomes them to his country, is concerned throughout the musical’s plot for the well-being of his daughter. He has good reason to worry: The villain of TBOM is named General Butt-Fucking Naked, a roguish, woman-hating warlord who generally (did you see what I did there?) terrorizes the Ugandan people and enforces female circumcisions (something Mafala indirectly references often whenever he talks with or about the still-intact Nabulungi). The warlord is a narcissist, officially known as ‘Butt-Fucking Naked’ because when he kills and drinks blood he does so in the nude. The assumption here is that this is both a brazen show of fearlessness (since in the nude a person is more physically vulnerable) and an indication that in his mind he is the only human that matters. The General emphasizes this latter idea when he enters in one scene and exclaims that the village belongs to him, and then murders a citizen who publicly objects. After this display of his customary violence, the General explains that the presence of the clitoris is somehow responsible for the AIDS epidemic the Ugandan people are facing, and then issues his latest decree: that every female in their village will be circumcised by the end of the week or he will get butt-fucking naked again and kill more people. Thus, Nabulungi doesn’t just need a change in her situation—she needs a literal, imminent rescue.

Mafala rushes his daughter away and back to their own house, where the next scene finds him telling Nabulungi to stay hidden indoors. Nabulungi does not want to be hidden away, and instead tries to explain to her father that she has found a possible answer for herself—a wonderful place she can go and be safe. This place is the one that the missionary men have been talking about. Mafala chastises her for being the idealist we now understand her to be—aligning her in musical theater tradition most immediately with Maria (The Sound of Music, 1959), Annie (Annie, 1977), Belle (Beauty and the Beast, 1994) and Tracy Turnblad (Hairspray, 2002), among others. He leaves her alone, and in solitude Nabulungi sings a song to cheer herself up, calm her fears and clarify for us watching in the audience what her strongest and most personal desire really is. Having been inspired by Elder Price’s talk about Salt Lake City, she sings her heart out about one day going to live there, envisioning what she will encounter when she reaches the city. Through the rhetorical power of poetic imagery and the physical energy of a body in performance, Nabulungi performs herself there, and we travel with her, at least for the duration of the song.

Her response is naive on one level—certainly, the missionaries have not been trying to convince the Ugandan people to relocate to Salt Lake City. However, the young Mormons’ enthusiasm about having knowledge of a place of peace is the essence of almost any religious yearning and is the universal ‘answer’ to Ugandan troubles that Nabulungi finds so appealing.

The sense of longing for a better place or paradise, through the use of song, is a standard device in American musical theater tradition, and many beloved musicals feature the use of such place-songs: ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), ‘Somewhere’ (West Side Story, 1957), ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This’ (Sweet Charity, 1966), ‘Home’ (The Wiz, 1974), ‘Somewhere That’s Green’ (Little Shop of Horrors) and ‘Santa Fe’ (Newsies, 1992).

In some ways she is aligned with Joseph Smith more closely in this moment than either of the missionary men are, including Elder Price, because she really believes that a space of inner peace can actually be found—one that is in harmony with an external, physical sense of peace and is free of the stress and torment of her everyday existence in Uganda. We are meant to feel empathy for Nabulungi as a character we recognize ourselves in and worry over: The physical, sexualized sense of threat and despair that surrounds Nabulungi and the other women of the village forms the psychological background texture against which Nabulungi’s ‘I-Want’ song (also often called an ‘I-Wish’ song—a traditional song type in musical theater wherein a character sings about the primary objective or desire that they pursue, or are at least influenced by, throughout the course of the story) is expressed in the plot as the number called ‘Sal Tlay Ka Siti.’

The title is a clever fragmentation of the proper pronunciation of ‘Salt Lake City,’ wherein the slight adjustment of the consonants makes the name strange and captures a sense of the way someone who did not speak English as a native language might attempt to pronounce the place name. The music is in a traditional musical theater ballad style, with verses in a loose ABAB rhyming pattern, alternating with chorus parts in an ABCB rhyming pattern. Nabulungi’s fragmentation of the name, which she does not recognize within the world of the play as a speech act mistake or ‘difference’ that needs correcting, is also interesting in that it is the first official moment in the musical of (unintentional) cross-cultural adaptation: She has heard the name of something Western/American, and in reproducing it through her song clarifies it as something new and uniquely her own.

As an ‘I-Want’ song, ‘Sal Tlay Ka Siti’ is thoroughly traditional, performed with a gentle piano accompaniment that swells toward the end dramatically, like many of the similarly functioning showtunes mentioned earlier. However, Parker, Lopez and Stone infuse even this familiar stage moment with original gestures.

For example, it is a particularly familiar gesture in musicals for the moment of longing for an ideal place to be sung by a female character in a musical. The choice to have a female sing such utopian longing—even when the onstage moment is a private, soliloquy-styled one (as it is here in TBOM for Nabulungi)—can be read as a feminist moment, since it offers for the viewing audience a voicing of female desire, and for the female character doing the singing it is a moment of clarity of thought, and even decision-making. (For a comprehensive discussion on female ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Fit for the ring—a training montage
• Chapter 1 Tradition versus originality: Musical theater’s titleholder and its number-one challenger (a win)
• Chapter 2 The fight America wanted: Faith as creative self-guidance versus faith as dutiful collective obedience (a win)
• Chapter 3 Cheap shots: Western representations of Africa versus African diaspora realities (a loss)
• Chapter 4 A caution: Putting LGBTQ advocacy on Queer Street
• Conclusion: Split decision—Defending the offending champions
• Index