NEW YORK — Trey Parker looked completely strung out. He plopped his disheveled self down at a table in a midtown restaurant, strands of his hair arrayed like errant stems out of a wild arrangement.
“I’m exhausted,” he said. “I’m a broken man.”
‘Mormon’ a product of creators’ unlikely love of Broadway
Next to him sat his longtime “South Park” writing partner, Matt Stone. He seemed more on edge but also more alert. “The invited dress and first preview were just insane,” Stone said. “I was mortified during the first shows, I was so nervous. Rudin” — Scott Rudin, one of the producers — “told us, ‘Don’t pay attention to the reaction.’ But I wasn’t in a good space to be a critic of our own thing.”
The guys from the diabolical cartoon sensation were all twitchy because D-Day was approaching. Down the block from the restaurant where they’d stopped to chat for a bit that evening in mid-March was their baby, the new musical, “The Book of Mormon,” and in a few days’ time the critics would be filing in to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre to pass judgment.
The revelation at the table, where Stone gobbled up a plate of pasta and Parker sipped a soft drink, was that these two princes of irreverence — the shepherds of a long-running TV show whose guiding principle is that nothing, but nothing, is sacred — seemed in awe of Broadway. Yes, Broadway, the glittery realm of tap shoes and sequins that you’d think would be a bull’s-eye on their snark target: They dearly wanted to be a part of it, to feel the embrace of the birthplace of “Oklahoma!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Hello, Dolly!”
Holy unlikely aspirations! The verdict, of course, is now in: The rhapsodic reviews for “Mormon” undoubtedly mean a long and prosperous life for their unbridled satire of organized religion. But still: Hearing these two talk so respectfully about Broadway is like the kid in class covered in tattoos and piercings whom you discover owns a stamp collection.
“I grew up loving musicals,” Parker confided.
“I get now why people get into this,” Stone added.
The successful beachhead established by the “South Park” boys is another sign of the opportunistic entertainment zone Broadway represents. That a show like “Book of Mormon” — which finds profane comic fodder in, among other things, missionaries, African poverty, “The Lion King,” Salt Lake City, Genghis Khan, “The King and I,” Johnny Cochran and “Star Trek” — can thrive a few blocks from “Mary Poppins” speaks to the ever-widening cultural swath of America on which Broadway has set its sights. (As Parker and Stone pointed out, the aisles of the theater are filled nightly with young men who are far, far better acquainted with how to find Comedy Central than the O’Neill.)
Hits of recent vintage such as “Avenue Q,” with its copulating puppets, and “The Producers,” which featured carrier pigeons in Nazi armbands, enthralled audiences while testing the boundaries of taste. In this regard, “The Book of Mormon” — which follows a pair of mismatched young missionaries sent by the church to Uganda — is the most adventurous musical yet. Though it makes fun of many things, its true satirical obsession is Mormonism, or more to the point, the stories and practices at the religion’s heart.
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