Broadway at Its Finest

The Book of Mormon national tour lives up to stellar reputation

There are some musicals that impress you with their stagecraft, choreography and singing abilities of its actors. The Book of Mormon, which just started its run at Winspear Opera House (playing through September 1), is not such a musical.

That’s not to say that any of those elements in the Tony Award winner are deficient in any way. But the primary goal of the production, written by Matt Stone and Trey Parker (South Park) and Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), is to be funny, and, paradoxically, the hilarity the sets, dancing and songs create can overshadow the skills needed to create it.

On the surface, The Book of Mormon can seem like a screed toward the Mormon religion. It follows two young and naïve Mormon missionaries, Elder Kevin Price (Mark Evans) and Elder Arnold Cunningham (Christopher John O’Neill), as they attempt to spread the word of God to Ugandan villagers.

Several of the songs take direct aim at various off-the-wall theology Mormons have taught through the years.

As they run into difficulties getting the Ugandans to buy into their proselytizing, they both have crises of faith, but in distinctly different manners.

How each of them deals with their predicaments — Kevin by spiraling downward, Arnold by reverting to lying — is the main thrust of the musical, and the source of some insanely catchy, provocative and surprisingly sweet songs.

Several of the songs, like “Turn It Off,” “All American Prophet” and “I Believe,” take direct aim at various off-the-wall theology Mormons have taught through the years. But the key to making those songs work is that they never make fun of the characters doing the singing, keeping them completely relatable.

It’s “I Believe” that drives home this point the best. It’s a last ditch effort for Elder Price to salvage the beliefs he’s held his entire life. And while the song is funny because of lines like “I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America” and “I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people,” it also tugs at the heart because of Elder Price’s earnestness.

Given its creators, it’s no surprise that the proceedings get more than a little profane, mostly from the Ugandan characters. It starts with “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” a crowd-pleasing yet hate-filled song aimed at God. Then there’s the local warlord, a man who dubs himself “General Butt-fucking Naked.” “Joseph Smith American Moses,” in which the Ugandans show all that they have learned from Arnold, takes everything that came before it and turns the dial to 11.

But it’s “Baptize Me” that may be the best song in the context of the play (the opening number, “Hello,” is hands-down the most memorable). That’s because it hits the mark in terms of both sweetness and raunchiness. It’s about Arnold baptizing Nabalungi (Samantha Marie Ware), but the allusions to sex are unmistakable, especially with various intonations and dance moves.

The choreography in The Book of Mormon won’t win any awards — it was one of the few Tony Awards the musical didn’t win — but it’s clear that they’re not going for style points. Every move seems designed to elicit laughs, including numbers that contain references to classic Broadway dance moves. The character of Arnold is especially clumsy, and O’Neill is a delight to watch as he awkwardly-on-purpose stumbles, slides and grinds his way through the songs.

The sets and backdrops are equally unremarkable. Most of them are utilitarian at best, but the choreography and set-up for most scenes don’t require them to be anything more than that. I will say that the backdrops showing Salt Lake City and Orlando are great for the detailed artwork, even if they’re not actually designed to transport you to those places.

The one area where it is the equal of any other musical is in the quality of its singers. Evans and Ware both have fantastic voices, no surprise given their respective histories in the theater. O’Neill is making his professional debut in this show, and he more than holds his own.

All of this is a long-winded way to say that this version of the national tour of The Book of Mormon only builds on the reputation that the musical already had. If you already have tickets, don’t even think about not using them. If you haven’t secured any yet, do anything in your power to get some. Calling it a must-see is the understatement of the century.

Mark Evans and Derrick Williams in The Book of Mormon.

Photo courtesy of AT&T Performing Arts Center

Mark Evans and Derrick Williams in The Book of Mormon.

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony