Parker : The show is one-tenth what we know about Mormons. Did you know missionaries and Mormons growing up? Stone : I knew Mormons, but I never knew missionaries. Stone : The underlying part of the story that I hope everyone can relate to is being 19 and going to college or the big city, leaving home, leaving the nest. That was reality! Do you go to the theater? Parker : Yeah, I was a big Broadway fan for a while. I was Danny [Zuko].
That was my crowning glory senior year. Parker : Yeah, we always had to kind of put this down and go back to dealing with the show. A fight!! Parker : We should put it out! But we were looking at this thing and realized we all kind of like Mormons as people, painting with a broad brush. That idea of holiness, that something could be hidden here, or everyone wants the end of the world to happen during their lifetime, is fascinating. And then the idea that they all went to Salt Lake City and then two hundred years later they send off 50 or 60 thousand people to Cambodia, Paris, and Russia, and do the same thing, and people fucking believe it.
There three of us being storytellers by trade -- I know that's a pretentious way of describing our fart jokes -- we have a weird reverence for religion and religious stories. Mormons are easy to laugh at: They dress up, they go door to door. But isn't it also kind of a beautiful and very American religion? It's a total New York thing to slough off Mormon beliefs but then extol the beauty of a Native American religion.
Actually, we wanted to give a New York theater audience -- cynics on a secular night out -- kind of a religious experience. So you came up with a duo of missionaries who get sent to Uganda We have Elder Price, our perfect, captain-of-the-football-team Mormon and Elder Cunningham, our fat schlubby Mormon, and we wanted to send them to the worst place on earth.
We were thinking Somalia. Somewhere God forgot. Actually, our original idea was that Elder Price was going to get shot in the face and die. We just loved the idea of presenting our lead, our star, and then killing him off straight away.
But it didn't work. Elder Cunningham is like Dorothy; he just drops in and tries to do the right thing. He couldn't have a crisis of faith. A project that has been seven years in the making, the show's plotline changed dramatically since the two first came up with the idea.
Parker said they originally wanted to write a story about Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the Mormon religion, but that a "covered wagons musical" wasn't going to work.
Both men said they are big fans of musical theater, and have often written show tunes for the crude cartoon characters of "South Park," some of which have mocked religion. Despite both men now having children in their lives, fatherhood hasn't seemed to slow down to soften the kings of vulgar cartoon comedy. I always thought 'South Park' for about [age] Parker said that while he lets his year-old stepson watch some episodes of "South Park" with him at home, there were times that he felt compelled to cover the young boy's ears during "The Book of Mormon.
As their ideas evolved, the principal characters crystallized into a bright-eyed zealot and his wacky, comedic companion. But developing them further proved a challenge. How would they ever find the time to create an entire musical?
Coming from TV and film, Parker and Stone were clueless about what he meant. The group embarked on the first of a half-dozen workshops that would take place during the next four years, ranging from minute mini-performances for family and friends to much larger-scale renderings of the embryonic show.
They have a pay scale just for workshops. A final five-week workshop took place in August, when Casey Nicholaw came on board as choreographer and co-director with Parker.
But the response they received was enough to make them commit. Financing Mormon proved easy and modest by Hollywood standards. It was Rudin who now booked a theater and hired key players while sets were designed and built, hundreds of actors auditioned and some 28 cast. Finally, a rehearsal space was found, tape laid on the ground to mark key spots, and the actual work of producing a full-blown musical got under way. Like the dozen or so technicians and stagehands sprinkled throughout the auditorium, they look wiped out.
Nicholaw shakes his whole head and body as two of the cast fail to get a movement quite right.
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