Book of Mormon – religion hits the West End

Hitchhiking through Salt Lake City as a student in 1976, I asked a local man, who was out shopping, directions to the nearest Salvation Army hostel. Rightly assuming I was down on my uppers, the man gave me his huge bag of groceries and walked off with a ‘bless you’. Say what you like about them, Mormons in my book are lovely. In several days spent in the most boring city on earth, I never met a nasty one.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now the subject of the much-hyped The Book of Mormon, which is finally about to open in the West End after a year of total triumph on Broadway. Its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are the men behind South Park, the scatological, cynical, badly drawn but addictively funny TV cartoon series that has been polluting young viewers’ minds since the Nineties.

Their musical is about missionaries — Elders — in Uganda. New York critics have been dribbling with pleasure at a show that rips the Michael out of both Mormons and Disney’s blithely happy The Lion King. In this new show the cast of missionised Africans sing ‘We haven’t had rain for several days/80 per cent of us have Aids’ and their big number is ‘Hasa Diga Eebowai’ which — to the Elders’ horror — translates as ‘Fuck you, God’.

There is apparently nothing modern about the score. The writers have stated that they wanted to deliver a good old-fashioned musical in the Broadway tradition and fully acknowledge their debt to Rodgers and Hammerstein, the duo that paved the way for the Bible (if not Mormonism) in their 1945 musical Carousel, which is partly set in heaven’s waiting-room, run by bossy angelic officials.