![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn November, I fell headfirst into falling desperately in love with the Book of Mormon musical.
I really wasn't expecting it to work in quite that way? I hadn't even ever watched it, although I've listened to the cast recording about a billion times, and am kind of desperately in love with parts of that, and I'd watched clips on YouTube. The problem for me was -- well. As I once toldseekingferret, Stone and Parker get what it is to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (*), they get it on a deep fundamental level, and I trust that they understand it. Because of that, I love what they do with it, and I don't mind them laughing at us. But the audience doesn't, and they're laughing at us, and... I can laugh at us. I can think we're kinda bizarre and hilarious. Stone and Parker can laugh at us. But I don't want to see you laughing at us. It's like, I can make fun of my own family but no one outside my family can, you know?
I have always absolutely adored the cast recording, in which there's no audience laughing. The songs are snappy and just easy to listen to. (I do wish there wasn't as much explicit language, but, you know, Stone and Parker, so it wasn't like I didn't know what I was getting into.) There are several songs that I honestly think could be adopted by our church -- "I Believe," while played for laughs, obviously, is a pretty good synopsis of what a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints actually believes.
There's also a really lovely interview with the cast here where they talk about that song starting at 7:30 -- Andrew Rannells says, "Matt Stone says there's actually no jokes in that song," and he's right; I can sing it as a literal song describing my church's beliefs -- and do -- without relating to it as a primarily-humorous song. (Well, except for the line "in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!" which is... one of those things where you have to laugh because if you don't you'll cry.) But also the actors speak to this very real major theme running through, which is that all religions have wacko things about them, we're just more used to the older ones.
I believe that the Lord God created the universe!
I believe that he sent his only Son to die for our sins!
And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America!
And, I mean, you can think that the third line there is kind of bizarre and hilarious! I kind of do too! But then, maybe, is the second line kind of bizarre and hilarious? It kind of... could be...? And is the first line kind of bizarre and hilarious? ...May...be? Maybe religious belief, in general, is kind of bizarre and hilarious; that's what Stone and Parker are saying.
And also, one thing I don't mind people laughing at: making a musical about Mormon missionaries is brilliant and one of those things that I'm like, why didn't I think of that? Because, like, have you met members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? (I mean, who aren't me. I'm a terrible example.) They're all so wholesome and nice and helpful and probably good singers and when they dance and jump around in tandem in "Two By Two" I'm like... yes, this is actually deeply deeply true to the spirit of how our missionaries actually are. (Except that when I go to church on Sunday and say hi to the missionaries... nineteen is really... much younger than the guys on Broadway are. I'm just saying.)
But anyway, back to watching the musical! I got this letter (no points for figuring out what I actually matched to) and I got to "So much of his character arc involves deconstructing his Good Mormon Boy facade and figuring out what kind of person he actually is underneath that, ugly parts and all, and while he does sort of find his way back, the crisis of faith he has in the second act feels like something a lot deeper, and I don't really see it being resolved by the end." and I was like... Wait What this is Highly Highly Relevant to my Interests.
So I watched it, so I could see this arc that she was referring to. And the thing is, yeah, people laugh at Mormons. A lot. But they also got me to laugh at, among other things, women, Africans, Chinese, white people, frogs, the clitoris, cultural appropriation, horribly repressed gay boys, cancer, people getting shot in the face... so, yeah, it's sort of an equal-opportunity let's-mock-everything kind of thing. I mean, it's all deeply, deeply offensive. And funny. So weirdly enough, it's so offensive that I'm on board.
And, holy cow, it's not just for laughs or for set-piece songs (although the set-piece songs are hilarious) -- it has a deeply cohesive and meaningful storyline about religion and what it's for and how it falls down, which I did not realize at all, and Elder Price does go through a really interesting and cohesive character arc. It's not at all obvious from the cast recording, where Price's role goes pretty much directly from "I Believe" to the finale, and also you don't see all the buildup that got him to "I Believe," but in the full musical, there's a distinct thematic element of what in my class I used to call "black-box God" -- you input prayer to the black box, and faith, and righteousness, and you get out blessings. It's the model I was taught when I was a kid, and which often gets a lot of reinforcement at church, and it rings very true that Price believes that. And in the aftermath of "I Believe," he is faced with definitive evidence that the black-box model doesn't work, and it's devastating for him! But Cunningham blunders into showing him -- and I already knew this was sort of the point of the musical -- that religion can actually help people a lot, even if maybe it's not true.
So this is the flip side to religious belief being bizarre and hilarious; it's also for something. "We're fighting for a cause but we're really really nice!" According to Wikipedia, Stone and Parker called it "an atheist's love letter to religion," which... yeah, is exactly right, it's what I feel it is when I listen to and watch it.
I watched a vid of the OBC (videos seem to keep getting taken down and going back up, so if this link stops working let me know and I'll try to find one that does) and most of Chicago (sorry, the one I watched has been taken down, but I will try to update this link if I find it again). Andrew Rannells' Kevin Price absolutely won my heart; physically and vocally, but most of all acting-wise, he is totally the epitome of a Good Mormon Boy, in all the good ways and bad ways. Rannells' portrayal of a combination of external confidence-shading-into-arrogance and internal uneasiness-that-might-one-day-become-angst, with a heaping dose of obedience/indoctrination, a good bit of non-self-awareness and also a good bit of kindness mixed in there too, is just exactly right -- this is the same religion where most of us are used to guilt and shame as a pretty powerful tool, but at the same time we have also all internalized that we're literal spirit children of God whose ultimate destiny is to become ourselves gods and goddesses... I think the key is that you can tell that Rannells likes Kevin Price, and that we're meant to like him too, even if Price is insufferable almost all of the time as well. Rannells' Price is so sincere. I get the sense that Rannells' Elder Price is telling us something really important to him when he says "I've always had the hope / That on the day I go to Heaven," and it's that sincerity that makes it hilarious when he ends with "Heavenly Father will shake my hand and say / You've done an awesome job Kevin!" And in "I Believe," it's not just that he's sincerely psyching himself up to believe, which is of course a Thing, but also that he is absolutely sincere when he says, "I've always longed to help the needy." That's as much part of his personality as the "something incredible" he desires to achieve.
(Not to say Rannells can't play specifically for laughs, because he totally can -- but the part where he exudes sincerity 95% of the time makes the 5% of times when he's insincerely and performatively playing to a laugh (like the Sound of Music callback "A warlord who shoots people in the face! What's so scary about that?") even more hilarious. But anyway, the fact he can make his voice and acting do alllll those different things is amazing to me. And doubly amazing that he NAILED Elder Price as a Mormon; it's actually hard for me to believe, watching him in this, that Rannells was never Mormon, he gets a lot of subtle, almost subliminal things exactly right -- and then I watched him in Falsettos, about which more later, and he was brilliant at playing a completely different character. But more about that some other time.)
I didn't like Nick Rouleau as Elder Price at all. Rouleau played Price as rather more robotic and insincere and plain unlikeable, which is I guess is a reasonable interpretation from an outsider (and, okay, I've met people like that) but didn't work at all for me. It felt to me like he was playing to the cheap laughs. One of my church friends saw BoM a while back and was expecting to like it, but didn't; and I really wonder whether it depends primarily on the actor who plays Price. Because Rannells made it work for me, he made me fall in love with what the show was doing, but if I'd seen it with Rouleau first I would have been turned off the whole thing.
I liked Ben Platt as Elder Cunningham more than Gad; Gad was kind of a sloppy misfit, playing up the sloppiness, while Platt played up more the aspect of wanting to fit in and really just not quite understanding how to do it, which I... have also seen at church. Possibly from me. Well, okay, not quite in the way Platt does it, but. He made it wildly sympathetic.
Also, I just realized that Andrew Rannells, especially with his hair done a particular way as Elder Price, looks very much like our old Bishop, Bishop S. (Bishop S doesn't sing or dance, any more than your average member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the average member does sing pretty well, but there's a wide variance), and is much milder in personality than Elder Price -- it's really a visual resemblance only), and his voice sounds like another Church member I knew, which adds a whole other level of hilarity to it for me. A+ casting, musical people.
(*) You will notice that throughout this post, I sometimes use "Mormon" and sometimes use "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." Starting in October of last year, we have been instructed NOT to say "Mormon" or "LDS" when talking about our church, but to use the full name instead, and I've been adhering to that in other posts/comments. When I use the word "Mormon" in this post, it's meant to refer (at least partially) to the musical or to people's external perceptions (where we're still Mormons).
I really wasn't expecting it to work in quite that way? I hadn't even ever watched it, although I've listened to the cast recording about a billion times, and am kind of desperately in love with parts of that, and I'd watched clips on YouTube. The problem for me was -- well. As I once told
seekingferret, Stone and Parker get what it is to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (*), they get it on a deep fundamental level, and I trust that they understand it. Because of that, I love what they do with it, and I don't mind them laughing at us. But the audience doesn't, and they're laughing at us, and... I can laugh at us. I can think we're kinda bizarre and hilarious. Stone and Parker can laugh at us. But I don't want to see you laughing at us. It's like, I can make fun of my own family but no one outside my family can, you know?I have always absolutely adored the cast recording, in which there's no audience laughing. The songs are snappy and just easy to listen to. (I do wish there wasn't as much explicit language, but, you know, Stone and Parker, so it wasn't like I didn't know what I was getting into.) There are several songs that I honestly think could be adopted by our church -- "I Believe," while played for laughs, obviously, is a pretty good synopsis of what a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints actually believes.
There's also a really lovely interview with the cast here where they talk about that song starting at 7:30 -- Andrew Rannells says, "Matt Stone says there's actually no jokes in that song," and he's right; I can sing it as a literal song describing my church's beliefs -- and do -- without relating to it as a primarily-humorous song. (Well, except for the line "in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!" which is... one of those things where you have to laugh because if you don't you'll cry.) But also the actors speak to this very real major theme running through, which is that all religions have wacko things about them, we're just more used to the older ones.
I believe that the Lord God created the universe!
I believe that he sent his only Son to die for our sins!
And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America!
And, I mean, you can think that the third line there is kind of bizarre and hilarious! I kind of do too! But then, maybe, is the second line kind of bizarre and hilarious? It kind of... could be...? And is the first line kind of bizarre and hilarious? ...May...be? Maybe religious belief, in general, is kind of bizarre and hilarious; that's what Stone and Parker are saying.
And also, one thing I don't mind people laughing at: making a musical about Mormon missionaries is brilliant and one of those things that I'm like, why didn't I think of that? Because, like, have you met members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? (I mean, who aren't me. I'm a terrible example.) They're all so wholesome and nice and helpful and probably good singers and when they dance and jump around in tandem in "Two By Two" I'm like... yes, this is actually deeply deeply true to the spirit of how our missionaries actually are. (Except that when I go to church on Sunday and say hi to the missionaries... nineteen is really... much younger than the guys on Broadway are. I'm just saying.)
But anyway, back to watching the musical! I got this letter (no points for figuring out what I actually matched to) and I got to "So much of his character arc involves deconstructing his Good Mormon Boy facade and figuring out what kind of person he actually is underneath that, ugly parts and all, and while he does sort of find his way back, the crisis of faith he has in the second act feels like something a lot deeper, and I don't really see it being resolved by the end." and I was like... Wait What this is Highly Highly Relevant to my Interests.
So I watched it, so I could see this arc that she was referring to. And the thing is, yeah, people laugh at Mormons. A lot. But they also got me to laugh at, among other things, women, Africans, Chinese, white people, frogs, the clitoris, cultural appropriation, horribly repressed gay boys, cancer, people getting shot in the face... so, yeah, it's sort of an equal-opportunity let's-mock-everything kind of thing. I mean, it's all deeply, deeply offensive. And funny. So weirdly enough, it's so offensive that I'm on board.
And, holy cow, it's not just for laughs or for set-piece songs (although the set-piece songs are hilarious) -- it has a deeply cohesive and meaningful storyline about religion and what it's for and how it falls down, which I did not realize at all, and Elder Price does go through a really interesting and cohesive character arc. It's not at all obvious from the cast recording, where Price's role goes pretty much directly from "I Believe" to the finale, and also you don't see all the buildup that got him to "I Believe," but in the full musical, there's a distinct thematic element of what in my class I used to call "black-box God" -- you input prayer to the black box, and faith, and righteousness, and you get out blessings. It's the model I was taught when I was a kid, and which often gets a lot of reinforcement at church, and it rings very true that Price believes that. And in the aftermath of "I Believe," he is faced with definitive evidence that the black-box model doesn't work, and it's devastating for him! But Cunningham blunders into showing him -- and I already knew this was sort of the point of the musical -- that religion can actually help people a lot, even if maybe it's not true.
So this is the flip side to religious belief being bizarre and hilarious; it's also for something. "We're fighting for a cause but we're really really nice!" According to Wikipedia, Stone and Parker called it "an atheist's love letter to religion," which... yeah, is exactly right, it's what I feel it is when I listen to and watch it.
I watched a vid of the OBC (videos seem to keep getting taken down and going back up, so if this link stops working let me know and I'll try to find one that does) and most of Chicago (sorry, the one I watched has been taken down, but I will try to update this link if I find it again). Andrew Rannells' Kevin Price absolutely won my heart; physically and vocally, but most of all acting-wise, he is totally the epitome of a Good Mormon Boy, in all the good ways and bad ways. Rannells' portrayal of a combination of external confidence-shading-into-arrogance and internal uneasiness-that-might-one-day-become-angst, with a heaping dose of obedience/indoctrination, a good bit of non-self-awareness and also a good bit of kindness mixed in there too, is just exactly right -- this is the same religion where most of us are used to guilt and shame as a pretty powerful tool, but at the same time we have also all internalized that we're literal spirit children of God whose ultimate destiny is to become ourselves gods and goddesses... I think the key is that you can tell that Rannells likes Kevin Price, and that we're meant to like him too, even if Price is insufferable almost all of the time as well. Rannells' Price is so sincere. I get the sense that Rannells' Elder Price is telling us something really important to him when he says "I've always had the hope / That on the day I go to Heaven," and it's that sincerity that makes it hilarious when he ends with "Heavenly Father will shake my hand and say / You've done an awesome job Kevin!" And in "I Believe," it's not just that he's sincerely psyching himself up to believe, which is of course a Thing, but also that he is absolutely sincere when he says, "I've always longed to help the needy." That's as much part of his personality as the "something incredible" he desires to achieve.
(Not to say Rannells can't play specifically for laughs, because he totally can -- but the part where he exudes sincerity 95% of the time makes the 5% of times when he's insincerely and performatively playing to a laugh (like the Sound of Music callback "A warlord who shoots people in the face! What's so scary about that?") even more hilarious. But anyway, the fact he can make his voice and acting do alllll those different things is amazing to me. And doubly amazing that he NAILED Elder Price as a Mormon; it's actually hard for me to believe, watching him in this, that Rannells was never Mormon, he gets a lot of subtle, almost subliminal things exactly right -- and then I watched him in Falsettos, about which more later, and he was brilliant at playing a completely different character. But more about that some other time.)
I didn't like Nick Rouleau as Elder Price at all. Rouleau played Price as rather more robotic and insincere and plain unlikeable, which is I guess is a reasonable interpretation from an outsider (and, okay, I've met people like that) but didn't work at all for me. It felt to me like he was playing to the cheap laughs. One of my church friends saw BoM a while back and was expecting to like it, but didn't; and I really wonder whether it depends primarily on the actor who plays Price. Because Rannells made it work for me, he made me fall in love with what the show was doing, but if I'd seen it with Rouleau first I would have been turned off the whole thing.
I liked Ben Platt as Elder Cunningham more than Gad; Gad was kind of a sloppy misfit, playing up the sloppiness, while Platt played up more the aspect of wanting to fit in and really just not quite understanding how to do it, which I... have also seen at church. Possibly from me. Well, okay, not quite in the way Platt does it, but. He made it wildly sympathetic.
Also, I just realized that Andrew Rannells, especially with his hair done a particular way as Elder Price, looks very much like our old Bishop, Bishop S. (Bishop S doesn't sing or dance, any more than your average member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the average member does sing pretty well, but there's a wide variance), and is much milder in personality than Elder Price -- it's really a visual resemblance only), and his voice sounds like another Church member I knew, which adds a whole other level of hilarity to it for me. A+ casting, musical people.
(*) You will notice that throughout this post, I sometimes use "Mormon" and sometimes use "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." Starting in October of last year, we have been instructed NOT to say "Mormon" or "LDS" when talking about our church, but to use the full name instead, and I've been adhering to that in other posts/comments. When I use the word "Mormon" in this post, it's meant to refer (at least partially) to the musical or to people's external perceptions (where we're still Mormons).
no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-28 08:00 pm (UTC)I also want to know: did you like Kevin Price when you saw it? Because I strongly feel that if the actor doesn't make him sympathetic as well as terrible, the whole thing kind of falls apart. Which is a pretty narrow tightrope to walk, much narrower than in a lot of shows, I feel like.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-02 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 04:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 04:14 am (UTC)It's definitely an interesting show to listen to from a Christian perspective (I tend to skip past Hasa Diga cos I feel a bit guilty singing along to it, but it's so catchy!!) but I love how it both skewers but is also affectionate to religion <3
I've only seen the OBC bootleg though I do also have the Chicago one downloaded somewhere, but I'm a little apprehensive about watching that one because I just love Andrew's portrayal so much, and like you said whether you can sympathise with Elder Price is a huge part of it. Andrew's Price is just so earnest and sweet and open and tries *so hard* even if not all of his motivations are pure. I am interested in seeing Ben Platt's Elder Cunningham though! I'd love to see it live sometime too, I just wish I could go back in time and see it with Andy :D
no subject
Date: 2019-03-06 05:32 am (UTC)Yeah... I'd honestly say you might want to skip around and mostly watch for Platt, because he's really great. I SO WISH I could go back in time and see it with Andrew Rannells!!
no subject
Date: 2019-10-09 01:12 pm (UTC)I saw The Book of Mormon for the first time last night, in the West End, and had a great time. Dom Simpson as Elder Price was fantastic; as you say of Rannells, it feels like Simpson likes the character, and that helps to make the character likeable to us as an audience too. The Book of Mormon has just enough heart to work, but Elder Price has to be played with sincerity, or the show loses that heart. The idea of him being played as 'robotic and insincere' is awful.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-11 07:29 am (UTC)I am so glad you had a great experience with the musical and with Dom Simpson! I haven't seen him at all, but now I'm going to have to go at least find clips :) I absolutely agree that it has just enough heart to work, and doesn't if Elder Price isn't played with sincerity <3