I’m back in New York City with my son.  Tomorrow a play he’s written the music to will be produced at NYU as part of his MFA work.  He was able to find us tickets to the play The Book of Mormon.

The high-concept musical, one of the hottest tickets in recent years, was written by the guys who created the TV series South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  When they were undergraduates at the University of Colorado they released a film, Cannibal! the Musical, which has become an underground legend and Internet star.  Here’ the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NElAI39jL7g&feature=related.  For this Broadway play, which I was lucky enough to see in the first month, they teamed up with Robert Lopez of Avenue Q.  The amazing thing about the play is that, while it ‘drops the f-bomb’ with regularity and almost never conforms to good taste (the humor is scatological, irreverent; bawdy), these three somehow pull it off.  While you might think the Mormon Church would be up in arms about the play, they don’t seem to be.  All in all, Mormons come off pretty well.  Indeed, with two potential Presidential candidates in the upcoming Presidential election http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/82634/preliminary-breakdown-the-gop-contenders, the play may just give the Mormon Church some otherwise-lacking street cred.

The two major characters, Kevin and Arnold, each representing different sides of ourselves, the side that reaps in the benefits of conformity and the ‘creative’ side, are thrown together to go to Africa to convert the natives.  They somehow win the hearts of the audience.  And the female lead played by Nikki M. James, too, won hearts, so at the final curtain, Broadway matinee theatergoers, supposedly a tough audience, all stood up and cheered the production.  Bravo!