Beyond belief: Book of Mormon co-creator Robert Lopez opens up

On the eve of The Book of Mormon’s arrival in Melbourne, co-creator Robert Lopez discusses the musical’s genesis.

A scene from The Book of Mormon, which was a hit on Broadway and in the West End.

In 2011, a new musical opened in New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre, unleashing a blitzkrieg of F-bombs and C-bombs and seeming bad taste the likes of which Broadway had never experienced. The show featured a cameo by Jesus Christ, countless instances of blasphemy, and references to female genital mutilation, sexually transmitted disease, terminal illness, domestic abuse, rape and dysentery in scenes of Third World squalor.

The Book of Mormon went on to win nine Tony Awards, including for best musical, and a Grammy Award for best musical theatre album. It opened in London’s West End in 2013 and arrives in Melbourne in February. In musical theatre terms, it’s bigger than Jesus.

Composer, lyricist and librettist Robert Lopez has written some of the filthiest, wickedest musical numbers ever to make it to the Great White Way. Before The Book of Mormon, his collaboration with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, 2003’s Avenue Q, included numbers with titles such as The Internet is for Porn and Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.

On the other hand, with his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez he has written songs for Disney’s 2011 Winnie-the-Pooh feature film, a Finding Nemo stage musical for a Disney theme park and, most notably, for the 2014 Disney juggernaut Frozen, including its inexorable pop paean Let It Go.

“It’s just different parts of me,” says Lopez, who also became the world’s youngest EGOT (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winner) in 2014. At 41, he has a smile that seems to suggest rascally goings-on. “I think all adults have that dissonance of being a little bit subversive and wanting to say things they shouldn’t say and, at the same time, wanting to be a good citizen and teach the next generation the way.”

‘There’s no question it’s a pro-religious show,’ Robert Lopez. Picture: David Joshua Ford.

The Lopezes have been hard at work for the House of Mouse this year. Aside from the 2018 Jack and the Beanstalk feature film Gigantic, it’s Frozen all the way; the duo have written a batch of new songs for the stage musical, set to open on Broadway in 2017, and for the movie sequel.

They have two young daughters, Katie and Annie, and live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a few minutes’ walk from Prospect Park, where Let It Go came to life on a perambulatory brainstorming session. Frozen was very much a family affair. Both girls had speaking roles in the movie.

“Our younger daughter used to go around saying, ‘We wrote Frozen!’ There’s some truth to that. We would share every song with them first and get their thoughts on it. Actually, she did write a couple of lines. She had some instincts that were great.”

Lopez’s two previous Broadway projects aren’t quite as family-friendly. He took one of his daughters, aged four at the time, to see Avenue Q on Broadway, having to whisk her out of the theatre when any of its age-inappropriate sequences loomed.

“Everything went over her head, and I don’t know if it contributed anything to making her who she is, but she loved the music.”

The Book of Mormon, however, is definitely a no-go zone for the little ones.

“I’ll only let my kids hear the first three songs.”

As a musical theatre-loving child growing up in New York’s Greenwich Village, Lopez auditioned for the lead role in Fiddler on the Roof. He was unsuccessful — “It was an early shock to the system,” he says — and turned his hand to composition instead.

Aged 11, he wrote a song for a show his drama club was putting together, called Gifted High School, which was part-Chorus Line, part-Fame. Lopez worked out an opening number with an agitated Sondheim-ian rhythm that evoked the jangly nerves of the characters in the story.

“I just fell in love with doing it. Everyone told me, ‘That’s what you’re meant to do’, and I felt that way too.”

As a teenager, Lopez compiled his songs on cassette tape, including his Sondheim-inspired Gifted High School opening number, and dropped it into Sondheim’s mailbox. Receiving Sondheim’s response was like “getting a letter from God”. “He gave me some criticisms but he also gave me a lot of encouragement. It was all the validation I needed.”

Lopez went on study English and music at Yale, majoring in the former, and then embarked on the three-year course at New York’s BMI musical theatre workshop. When it came to choosing a collaborator, he gravitated towards student Jeff Marx, who had impressed with a song called People Suck. In their second year, the pair created a full-length Muppet adaptation of Hamlet called Kermit, Prince of Denmark, which won them the Kleban award for young writers and $US100,000.

It was around this time that Lopez started wondering if there might be a way to marry his pure love of comedy with his serious obsession with musical theatre.

“People had written funny songs before and funny musicals, but no one had really written a modern, hilarious one that never stops being funny that also makes you feel something, with a story you actually care about. I thought, that’s a big unoccupied space that I could possibly fill. And then, of course, the South Park movie happened. And I said, shit — it’s been done.”

Robert Lopez with co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame.

As well as 146 utterances of the word “f..k”, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut featured several songs by show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone co-written with Marc Shaiman, who would go on to co-create the musical Hairspray. As with the television series, the animation was intentionally crude, but there was nothing half-assed about the musical numbers, which were surprisingly tuneful and traditional. No less a luminary than Sondheim regarded it as one of the finest modern musicals. Lopez was especially taken by La Resistance — an ingenious, reprise-driven finaletto that nodded to One Day More from Les Miserables.

Seeing the film was nothing short of inspiring. “It got us off our asses,” he says.

Scanning a TV guide one night that summer, Lopez hit upon the concept of combining Friends and Sesame Street — the epiphany that led to the Muppet musical Avenue Q.

Another BMI student, Kristen Anderson, happened to be in the audience for a showcase presentation of Avenue Q, for which Lopez was wearing a red yarn wig. “And Kristen said, ‘That’s the guy I’m going to marry,’ ” Lopez says, laughing.

Avenue Q opened off-Broadway in early 2003, moving to Broadway proper within weeks. Lopez and Anderson married later in the year. Already, Lopez and Marx were talking about a sequel to the Bible as a potential follow-up show. “I realised that The Book of Mormon, the actual text, was like The Bible: Part 3. We thought, let’s just do that.”

Meanwhile, the South Park creators were working on a puppet project of their own — the all-marionette summer blockbuster spoof Team America: World Police. On a visit to New York, they went to see Avenue Q on the suggestion of a producer friend.

Lopez and Marx were also in the theatre that evening. The usher told them, “Your friends are here.” In fact, they had never met, but Lopez had thanked them in the playbill as one of his influences. “I can see now how that may have been creepy,” he says.

When the four of them met properly after the show, Lopez mentioned the Book of Mormon concept, and something clicked. Parker and Stone had long had an interest in Mormonism too — their film Orgazmo, originally intended to be a musical, was about a missionary wading into the porn industry.

Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez accept their Oscar in 2014. Picture: Getty Images.

For his part, Lopez had “felt very religious” growing up. He was a cantor at his church, was exposed to a lot of church music, and was fascinated by “the link between music and God”. Theology continued to interest him in college, during which time he sang professionally in an episcopal choir, even as he lost his faith. (One of his college professors was Harold Bloom, who called Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an “authentic religious genius” in his book The American Religion.)

All four of them were excited about working together on a musical version of The Book of Mormon — until Lopez actually bought a copy. “I read the first 20 pages and couldn’t make it through,” Lopez says. “It was so boring. So that idea went out.” The next brainwave, a musical about the story of Joseph Smith, was eventually dismissed as too Oklahoma! — horses, wagons and Americana. Those ideas were poured into an episode of South Park called All About Mormons instead.

It was Parker who finally said, “What if we did a missionary story?”

There was some talk about it being a movie project, which interested Lopez initially. “In the end I realised this story would be much more impactful on stage, live, in the context of an art form in which it’s completely without comparable peer. Nothing had ever been done like it.”

Some in the Broadway community were sceptical of Parker and Stone’s musical theatre cred. Lopez received a lot of comments along the lines of “Good luck with that”. Marx walked away from the project, reportedly baulking at the level of creative control Parker and Stone wanted. He and Lopez collaborated for the last time on a musical episode of the medical comedy Scrubs in 2007, garnering Emmy nominations for the songs Everything Comes Down to Poo and Guy Love.

The new trio embarked on a field trip to Salt Lake City, where they realised just how perfectly the Church of Latter-day Saints lent itself to a kind of cheesy musical theatre treatment. Most importantly, the characters would sing.

“This is a broad generalisation, but Mormon families are very wholesome, the kids are cute, they have Family Home Evening” — a church tradition that is exactly what it sounds like — “they don’t drink, they don’t smoke. Their openness, that element of naivete, just calls out for song on stage. Every musical needs characters that burst into song. Whereas if you were doing Scientology? There’s really no reason they would sing. They seem pretty intense.”

Lopez was also attracted to the notion of sending a couple of cheerfully unsuspecting missionaries to the Third World, setting the scene for a culture clash in the tradition of The King and I. “I thought, that makes it global, political, and it makes it about God and geopolitics — all in one story. That really got me going.”

The key was that the Mormon characters would be expecting colourful, cartoon Africa a la The Lion King, but instead have to confront urban blight and hardship. The challenge of putting war, poverty and famine to music was not taken lightly.

“It’s the kind of thing we as Americans don’t automatically hear about in the media, and we tend to avoid thinking about it. We researched the crises in Somalia, the Congo, northern Uganda. Even though it was a comedy we were very serious about the research.”

The song that emerged from these ruminations was Hasa Diga Eebowai, which would present the tough, gritty reality of Ugandan life with the carefree breeziness of Hakuna Matata:

“When the world is getting you down / There’s nobody else to blame / Raise your middle finger to the sky / And curse his rotten name.” Besides 15 occurrences of the word “f..k”, the song is a catalogue of authentic horrors faced in modern-day Africa, including the child sexual abuse encouraged by the widespread belief that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS.

Kristen was appalled. “I never listen to her when she tells me to tone it down,” says Lopez with a laugh, though he admits the song did feel genuinely dangerous. When theatre performers were invited to participate in a workshop for the show, they would receive script pages with little in the way of useful context.

“With the formatting of a musical script, you put all the lyrics in capital letters, so there were whole pages where it’s like: ‘C..t! C..t! C..t! F..k you God!’ It just looked like the rantings of a crazy, angry person.”

Even so, they knew the song was crucial to the show. “When it feels right, the song is about the injustice of the world. You’re cheering for the Ugandans.”

The secret and surprise of The Book of Mormon is that its heart is as big as its mouth is foul. It’s celebratory, rather than cynical, in its depiction of the church and religious values in general. A song called They Lie, decrying all religion, was scrapped; its replacement, the soaring 11 o’clock number I Believe, pokes gentle fun at doctrine, but the way it swells into a pro-faith power ballad is entirely sincere — weirdly anticipating the stirring heights of Let it Go. “They’re both characters at a low point, kind of doubling down and finding something new in themselves,” Lopez says.

“It was never our wish to take down someone’s religion. When you see the show, there’s no question it’s a pro-religious show, and that the feeling of the show is a religious feeling. You can’t tell if it promotes a belief in God or it doesn’t, but you know it’s not mean-spirited.”

A year after Parker and Stone had received death threats for their depiction of Mohammed on South Park, however, it seemed prudent to prepare for public outrage. Extra security was hired for the theatre ahead of opening night; Kristen scrubbed the family’s personal information off the internet.

“Everyone was a little nervous,” Lopez says. “We were expecting protests.”

The Book of Mormon opened on March 24, 2011 to largely rapturous reviews and no protests. “We certainly weren’t expecting, ‘Oh, this is a sure-fire mainstream hit! It’s going to run for years!’” Lopez laughs. The show has been selling standing-room-only tickets ever since.

The reaction of the church itself was overwhelmingly positive too. There have even been reports of people being inspired to take up the faith because of the show. In 2012, the church took to advertising in the musical’s playbills.

Lopez, Parker and Stone reunited earlier this year in time for the show’s anniversary. “I’m dying to do something else with them,” Lopez says. “The Book of Mormon is a high bar to pass, but we’re talking about other things.”

They’ve worked together only once since, on an episode of South Park, for which Lopez summoned some of his dirtiest material ever. (Fellatio was a major plot point.) It happened the same week that Lopez had his first meetings with Disney Animation — a 90-minute drive across Los Angeles from South Park Studios — for what would become Frozen.

Lopez looks forward to doing more “non-X-rated work for adults”, in the sweet spot between the obscene and the squeaky-clean. But he’s pleased at having done his part in helping the American musical grow up. “People had the sense that Broadway had to be clean, had to be family-friendly, had to be love stories or romantic comedies,” he says. “It was time for Broadway to start to tell different stories. And people were ready for it.”

The Book of Mormon opens at Princess Theatre, Melbourne, on February 4.