Review: The Book of Mormon at the Liverpool Empire *****

Ding dong! The Mormons are back in Liverpool with glad tidings – as long as you’re not easily offended that is.

Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez’s gleefully irreverent/outrageously disrespectful and insulting* (*choose as applicable) religious satire was a big hit when it played the Empire for a month in summer 2022.

And this impeccably produced and performed current touring production of the multi award-winning musical has all the attributes needed to convert plenty of new theatregoers.

It’s a long way from Utah to Uganda – geographically, socially and nominally spiritually - as the enthusiastic but naive ingenues of the Mormons’ ‘Missionary Training Center’ discover when they get their first posting.

Beatifically devout star pupil Elder Kevin Price (Adam Bailey) has been praying for his own idea of heaven (the theme parks of Orlando), so he’s less than overjoyed when it turns out he’s been assigned to the warlord-ruled north of the East African country instead.

Not only that, but his conversion buddy is Arnold Cunningham (Sam Glen), hapless but well-meaning misfit, fantasist and compulsive liar, who hero worships the class’s golden boy.

What on earth could go wrong?

Everything of course, and in wonderfully ribald and deliciously dark fashion, as Kevin and Arnold find that promoting the Book of Mormon to a poverty-stricken, rebel gunman-harried local population isn’t going to be easy.

There are a lack of doorbells to ring for starters.

Together Bailey and Glen make for a delightful ‘odd couple’, and each individually shine as they go through separate journeys towards some kind of redemption and better understanding of themselves, others and the religion they proselytise for.

Glen has great fun as Arnold heads way off piste from the approved (corporate) conversion script to bring his audience to Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s vision of God, while Price’s concurrent, caffeine-fuelled crisis of faith is perfectly calibrated.

Above: Elder Cunningham (Sam Glen) goes off piste from the corporate conversion script. Top: The Mormons are Africa. Apparently.

And they’re surrounded by a great supporting cast, from fellow Mormon missionaries led by Tom Bales’ Elder McKinley (putting the ‘kamp’ into Kampala) to the resistant, fatalistic and filthily forthright villagers they seek to convert, including Nyah Nish as the sweet and optimistic Nabulungi and Kirk Patterson as her father Mafala.

Apart from the knowing references to The Lion King, Parker, Stone and Lopez lace their scabrous script with a set of songs which cheekily nod in the direction of Rodgers and Hammerstein classics The Sound of Music (I Believe being a variation of Maria’s I Have Confidence) and The King and I – the villagers’ Joseph Smith American Moses performance a nod to The Small Cabin of Uncle Tom.

They’re delivered with musical zeal by the cast, and while it’s almost impossible to pick a favourite, the Spooky Mormon Hell Dream is right up there for sheer enjoyment value.

It's very clever, but no one could claim it was subtle, and as I said at the start, some may find it actively offensive, either for religious reasons or potentially in its depiction of African people - albeit the show's Ugandan characters are never passive bystanders or agency-less plot devices in the wider story. They're in on the joke, and its butt is very definitely the Mormon boys.

Meanwhile although centred on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – to give the Mormon church its full title – South Park creators Parker and Stone, and co-creator Lopez, examine wider issues around religious teachings, faith and doubt.

And while its done with the lightest, and naughtiest of touches, The Book of Mormon does have something meaningful to say about the importance and power of belief - if only in yourself.

Incidentally (here comes the Liverpool history part), thousands of Mormon converts from Britain and Europe emigrated to America from the Mersey in the 19^th Century, first to Illinois and later to Utah.

Future leader Brigham Young even visited the port in 1840 to lead the church’s missionary efforts in Britain, and it was in Liverpool and under his direction that the first UK Book of Mormon was printed in 1841.