No one involved knew what to expect as the musical with the bizarre title prepared for its arrival on Broadway in 2011. There had been no tryout. Two of its authors, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” fame, were newcomers to the theater, except that, as teenagers, Parker played Sammy Fong in “Flower Drum Song” and Stone played Danny Zuko in “Grease.”
Robert Lopez, the third collaborator, and a pint-size Jet in his fifth-grade “West Side Story,” had more experience: With Jeff Marx, he’d come up with the concept and co-written the songs for the raunchy 2003 hit “Avenue Q.”
Still, “The Book of Mormon,” named for the holy text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, pushed tastelessness considerably further than any of those shows, soaring past even “The Producers,” the 2001 taboo-busting champion with its adorable Nazis and swastika kick line.
“Mormon” cast members, knowing they were the show’s first line of offense, were especially anxious. Those who played young missionaries about to embark on their maiden mission had to parrot articles of faith that, while accurate to the church’s dogma, sounded satirical on a Broadway stage. (“Did you know that Jesus lived here in the U.S.A.?”) And those who played Ugandans in a village where two of the missionaries were posted had to sing cheerily about AIDS, clitoridectomy, baby-raping and one man’s maggoty scrotum.
Taking precautions against a potentially hostile response, the production hired extra security for a few weeks around opening. And if some cast members worried that an army of the offended might sooner or later run them out of town, the authors were more worried about running at all.
“I’ve never been more nervous in my life,” Stone told me. “We didn’t want to lay an egg and fail.”
Is there an opposite to laying an egg? “Mormon” was a hit with critics and audiences. Even the Latter-day Saints leadership (if not some individual members) declined to get ruffled. The night I saw it, no less a dignified eminence than Angela Lansbury, seated directly in front of me, laughed her head off. I laughed too, all the time wondering: How did they dare put this on? Those laughs were half gasp.
Two weeks ago, I once again took a seat at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, this time to watch a celebratory performance for the show’s 15th anniversary. Fans around me were cosplaying as missionaries while more than 70 former cast members hugged and shrieked their hellos. Even lacking Lansbury, I laughed as hard as I had in 2011. But now I wondered not how they dared in the first place, but how they still dared today.
That’s because “Mormon” in 2026 is in some ways more gasp inducing than it was when it opened. In the intervening years, sensitivities once barely acknowledged about racial, religious and sexual identity have become mandatory articles of theatrical faith. And though the authors have made a few adjustments, notably after 20 cast members wrote a private letter to them in 2020 raising concerns about the representation of the Ugandan villagers, the show’s gleeful taboo busting seems even more likely to cause offense now that inoffensiveness has become Broadway’s brand.
Which creates a paradox. Satire usually stales quickly; an old theater maxim says it’s what closes on Saturday night. Yet here was a satire that, as tolerance for ridicule diminished around it, seemed to grow more extreme by comparison. Around the time the villagers at the recent celebration performed “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” in which they repeatedly curse God while dancing with middle fingers aloft, I began to wonder whether the Broadway “Mormon,” despite nearly 6,000 performances for six million theatergoers and grosses now heading toward $1 billion, could even be produced today. And if it couldn’t, what would that say about us?
The authors had not meant “Mormon” to be offensive, let alone controversial. In a group video interview earlier this month, full of cross talk and jumped-on jokes, Stone recalled that it hadn’t even started out to be satire. When the team began talking in 2004, Parker saw it as “a covered-wagons period piece that was going to be very Rodgers and Hammerstein.” Lopez said he had imagined it as “a sequel to the Bible” before realizing that such a sequel already existed in the Latter-day Saints’ foundational text.
Still, Stone and Parker, having grown up around church members in Colorado, did not want to make fun of them or their religion. “They believe goofy stuff, but they’re really nice,” Parker said. “If you have one as a neighbor, you have a great neighbor.”
That was the seed for a gentle lesson: Faith need not be logical to be meaningful; in fact, the opposite might be true.
The classic bones of the Golden Age models helped stabilize “Mormon,” keeping it from becoming disposable shock comedy even when the writing grew more outrageous. Lopez noted that the song “I Believe,” in which the main missionary steels himself for the work of bringing God’s word to unwilling ears, is pretty much templated on Maria’s buck-up song “I Have Confidence” in “The Sound of Music.” Another number, “Joseph Smith American Moses,” in which the villagers present a potted version of church history, is a riff on the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” sequence in “The King and I.”
Still, the “Mormon” authors took their models to new places. The missionary’s new confidence results in proctological complications Maria never imagined. You won’t find any reference in “The King and I,” as you do in the “Joseph Smith” number, to curing disease by having sex with an amphibian. Nor are such blasphemies confined to the stage. “Mormon” merch in the lobby includes a “magical AIDS frog” plushie.
“All Matt and I have ever done since college is ride into what people are saying you can’t say,” Stone said, referring to the 2025 “South Park” story line featuring Satan and Donald Trump as lovers, or any of thousands of other possible examples. “And we do it anyway and people throw money at us. That is our career.”
But Parker pointed out that “Mormon” also benefits from advice they received from the television producer Norman Lear, whose groundbreaking 1970s sitcoms (“All in the Family,” “Maude”) made similar beelines for the biggest taboos (bigotry, abortion). “If you want people to really laugh,” Parker recalled Lear saying, “make it about something they’re really anxious about.”
That maxim applies to performers as well. Arbender Robinson, who has been with “Mormon” on and off for 15 years, playing all the male villager roles, told me that at several points he had to “have conversations” with himself about doing and saying the outrageous things the show requires.
By July 2020, with Broadway on pandemic pause and the killing of George Floyd fresh in mind, other Black cast members were having similar conversations. In their letter that month, they argued that the African characters’ lack of agency and extreme naïveté (one character thinks she can send a text on a typewriter) could no longer be seen through the same comic lens as before. Still, Robinson said, he signed not because he wanted to water down the satire — among a handful of other tweaks, the authors replaced the typewriter with an iPad — but because he wanted to keep it as fresh and pointed as possible. “If it weren’t so extreme,” he added, “it wouldn’t work.”
That’s a lesson few recent satires have taken to heart. The only other current Broadway show that uses outrageousness as a kind of moral defibrillator is Cole Escola’s hit “Oh, Mary!” — a comic fantasy featuring Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret singer. Aiming to imitate that show’s leap from Off Broadway to a bigger venue are last season’s shocker, “Prince Faggot,” which posits Prince George of Wales, currently a 12-year-old boy, as a gay man circa 2032, and “Slam Frank,” a musical that imagines what the Anne Frank story would look like if performed in accordance with current identitarian politics. (She’s pansexual and Latinx, for starters.)
Andrew Fox, the creator of “Slam Frank,” as well as its composer and lyricist, is no stranger to the “Mormon” ethos. (A previous show of his was called “Veronica Gets an Abortion.”) He too is poking at sweet-spot sensitivities, but in “Slam Frank” they’re theatrical ones.
“In the early 2010s,” he said, “the theater began this hyper-focus on identities and on rules around how you could tell stories about them” — rules that can pit the value of inclusivity (everyone matters) against the value of diversity (only some people own certain narratives).
Fox created “Slam Frank” to be “a stress test” of such rules, applying them to a beloved work of Holocaust literature to determine “when they are valuable and when they are not.” The result bears out his aesthetic proposition that theater should not be “a political rally or a preacher’s sermon,” but a discomfiting experience “closer to a theme-park ride or a BDSM session.”
“Slam Frank” suggests a commercial proposition as well. “When other people are observing these arbitrarily imposed taboos,” Fox said, “that creates a nice little market gap for anybody else who is willing to take these things head on. If I’m going to be the only person addressing this, I’m going to capture the audience that the rest of you lost.”
Though the commercial theater is considered more risk-averse than its nonprofit cousins, the success of “The Book of Mormon” and “Slam Frank” and “Oh, Mary!” points in the opposite direction. Fox, who called some of the nonprofits he approached “blatantly cowardly” because they liked his show but were afraid to produce it, said, “Only in the commercial theater can something like ‘Slam Frank’ get through.”
For a related reason, a nonprofit theater was never going to be a good fit for “Mormon,” which needed the shock and awe of Broadway to drive home its points, its authors said. It helped that Parker and Stone, who are also among the show’s producers, didn’t blink at the $11.4 million price tag.
So could “Mormon” be mounted on Broadway today? The film and television producer Judd Apatow, no stranger to the frontiers of taste in movies like “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” said he didn’t think Stone and Parker would have any problem, “because they are the best.”
“Look at what happened with ‘South Park’ this year,” he added, referring to a tumultuous, Trump-trolling season filled with delays and disputes and lampoons of Paramount, the show’s corporate overlord. “Not only was it not more difficult for them to do cutting-edge work, but they got paid a billion dollars to do it.” Actually the payout was $1.5 billion.
In the new documentary “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!,” which Apatow directed with Michael Bonfiglio, several comedians consider the same question as it applies to “The Producers” and especially “Blazing Saddles,” Brooks’s 1974 comedy that invokes a racial slur more than 30 times as part of its lampoon of racism. Nick Kroll says, “Nah, you couldn’t make” that movie the same way today. Ben Stiller agrees, adding, “Or ever, I think?”
But Dave Chappelle’s response is subtler. “Man, you can do damn near anything if it’s funny. So no, most people can’t make that movie, ever. Today or even back then. But Mel Brooks could.”
Which applies to “Mormon” too. Hidebound and preachy though the commercial theater can be, it sometimes admits its own antidote.
Robinson believes that’s beneficial — at least for now. Instead of “tiptoeing around things to avoid offending anyone,” he said, “we have to be brave enough to engage in the full conversation.”
Still, he added, “there will come a day where we again re-evaluate and say, ‘I think it’s run its course. We can tell a different story now.’”
Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for The Times.
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