Years ago, when I was living in England, one day the doorbell rang and there stood two painfully clean-cut young men in white Oxford shirts, narrow black ties and pearly-white smiles.
“Hello!” one of them grinned, holding up a serious-looking volume. “My name is Elder Smith, this is Elder Jones, and we would like to share with you this most amazing book.”
They were, of course, Mormons, posted to London for their two-year missionary tour of duty. Curious, I invited them in, offered coffee or tea (“Um, no thanks, we’re all set” – I soon learned Mormons eschew stimulants; one strike already) and was soon being introduced to the myths and mores of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Elders Smith and Jones persisted with their tuition for a couple more visits, but strikes two and three came pretty quickly. I started reading the Book of Mormon, which purports to be an account of ancient Israelites who sailed from Judea to South America and were visited by Jesus during the mysterious three-day hiatus between the Crucifixion and Resurrection. From it, I learned that half of those settlers were bad people whom God turned into black people for their sins, and from the earnest Elders that black people were still welcomed as converts but not quite full members of the brotherhood.
I started reading the Book – a turgid chronology allegedly translated from mysterious “golden plates” discovered in upstate New York in the 1820s, written in a clumsy imitation of King James English – but closed it less than halfway through. Strike three. It was “just so boring,” as one of the missionaries confesses in the musical I saw last night.
I had never seen The Book of Mormon before its national tour stopped off this week at Hartford’s Bushnell Performing Arts Center (playing through Sunday). I knew of it, of course. It’s been selling out on Broadway since 2011, at which time it held the all-time Are You Kidding? prize for Most Improbable Premise for a Musical – a trophy lately snatched by Hamilton. But all I really knew about it was that it’s a cheeky lampoon of Mormonism created by the cheeky authors of South Park.
The first number opens with the actual greeting I got from my Mormon visitors, except here the evangelical pair of 19-year-old virgins are named Elder Price, a toothy self-publicist, and Elder Cunningham, a dumpy dork. They’ve been posted t
o a rural village in Uganda which is populated, naturally, by black people, who are plagued by dysentery and AIDS and terrorized by a murderous warlord named Butt-Fucking Naked – in other words, beset by problems more pressing than the state of their souls.
But while it touches on some “real” issues (including female genital mutilation), the show is more sendup than satire, with the Mormon church performing the role of sitting target, much as Donald Trump does on Saturday Night Live. The local Ugandans are depicted as ignorant and credulous – but then so are the Mormons.
Aside from the relentless profanities that define the Africans’ dialect and the South-Park-ish scatology, the show struck me as a parody of old-fashioned musicals, with songs (cute lyrics, derivative tunes) exploding into manic dance numbers and the plot twists’ final resolutions visible from the next village.
For me, the surprise highlight of the evening was PJ Adzima, a Valley native, who is deliciously fey as the not-so-tightly closeted Elder McKinley (on confronting your feelings: “Imagine that your brain is made of tiny boxes. Find the box that’s gay and crush it!”). The two leads are appropriately fatuous but transparent (Gabe Gibbs) and self-doubting but puppy-eager (Conner Peirson), and Leanne Robinson’s slender frame houses Tabernacle-quality pipes as the village girl who accepts conversion as her ticket to the Promised Land, a.k.a. Salt Lake City.
Production photo by Joan Marcus
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