With the controversial US musical The Book of Mormon transferring across the pond soon, it’s interesting to learn a bit about the history behind the production.
The Book of Mormon was created by Matt Stone, Trey Parker – best known for their hit X-rated cartoon show South Park. They worked on the show together with Robert Lopez whose equally provocative production Avenue Q was the scene where the trio first came together.
Parker and Stone grew up near each other in Colorado and eventually met at the state’s University, in Boulder, where they began their creative collaboration – starting with Cannibal the Musical; a musical film. Interestingly, Colorado ranks as the 9th most populous state by the number of followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) whose members are also known as Mormons. It is this familiarity with Mormonism that has come to influence a lot of their work – including a creating the character of Joseph Smith, who is the founder of the LDS Church and the religious leader of the Mormons. They also produced a film called Orgazmo in 1998 which sent up Mormonism. Later on, after South Park took-off, they revisited the subject in 2003, in the episode entitled “All About Mormons”. In it, the story of the LDS Church’s founding and how The Book of Mormon, the religion’s sacred text, came to be, is told through a series of hilarious flashbacks, against a backdrop of musical narration. This episode, perhaps, was the final seed need to be sown, before The Book of Mormon: The Musical evolved into a full-scale production.
Later in the same year, Stone and Parker visited New York to discuss one of their other projects, when they were advised to see Avenue Q on Broadway. This show’s writers – Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez realised that Stone and Parker were in the audience, decided to say hello. And the rest, as they say, is history!
Avenue Q – written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx
The foursome carried on their meeting over drinks, and quickly came to learn that they each wanted to delve into a project centreing on Mormon founder Joseph Smith. The group started working on ideas for a present-day story pretty much immediately, and even visited Utah – the most populous US state by the number of resident Mormons, for research purposes. They interviewed several missionaries, or rather “ex-missionaries” as Parker explained.
Later on, in 2006, despite a busy timetable working on South Park, the duo flew to London to spend almost a month with Lopez while Avenue Q was showing in the West End. This clearly helped their creative process, as they managed to even write half a dozen songs as well as fleshing out the majority of the plot.
Sadly though, “creative differences” between Trey Parker and Jeff Marx meant that Marx went his own way…. And then there were three!
Nevertheless, the remaining three continued to work together, often flying between the east and west coast of the USA to see each other. It must be noted, however, that the format of the project was not yet decided – it was Lopez who pushed for it to be a stage production, and used theatre industry lingo such as “workshopping” it, which stumped the TV duo.
The most incredible part of The Book of Mormon’s story is that even with developmental workshops taking place, as well as mini-shows for friends and family scaling up to larger performances – spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, the team were still not convinced that the concept would go any further.
Nevertheless, it did make it all the way to Broadway, opening in the summer of 2010, with the production astonishingly coming under the $11 million budget at a snip – just $9 million. And even more amazingly, the producers first heard the full musical –with its complete orchestra – just six days before the show opened to its first paying audience.
I can’t think of a better example of “meant-to-be” – let’s hope that The Book of Mormon maintains its A-grade, when it arrives as a show in London!
