Musical BOM

I just can't shake the Mormon frenzy. Not that I have been trying in public, but in private I yearn to engage with my religion in the manner it deserves. This becomes difficult when the discourse has bloated on the cultural-political stage. Of course, the stage, always the best metaphor in a self-fashioning culture, is now dominated by Elders singing and dancing in the way that Elders have always wanted. I haven't seen Matt Stone and Trey Parker's The Book of Mormon, primarily because Broadway musicals are for 1) members of the upper class, 2) people who visit New York, 3) those who see more depth in a Sondheim musical than I do (I see depth in his composing, by the way, but that is the problem--his depth is an anomoly on Broadway, which is why he is praised and anthologized so much more than he needs to be). But I have listened to the music, read and heard interviews with the creators, tried to engage the commentary on the musical, and thought about it. I guess this is the next best thing to watching it, which I will probably never get to do. My response cannot wait any longer. I'll divide my response into sections: 1) Broadway in general, 2) Mormon culture in general, 3) The Matt Stone-Trey Parker machine, and 4) some critiques of the musical as I see it. I will come to no conclusions, but I will lay out some concerns.

Broadway and musical theater: 
The musical theater form is a phenomenon that has been written about plenty, usually by defenders. I am more interested in the attackers, not because that job is relatively easy but because I'd like to see a serious engagement, or critique, of the "art" side of the musical. As a high school student, I loved musical theater. I was intensely drawn to the melodic songs that simultaneously told dramatic stories (as opposed to folk music, which I thought told stories and were plenty melodic, but lacked the drama), and I enjoyed the sense that performances in musical theater were just that--performances that draw attention to themselves. In fact, I might argue that musical theater is the perfect genre for the high school sensibility (doesn't it make sense that punk rock, heavy metal, Gaga-ish pop, gangster rap are so popular in high school--they eschew the subtle for performance's sake, like a high schooler's crescendoed scream to "look at me!!!!!!") I performed in several musicals as a high schooler, and I like to think I held my own. I am by nature a performer, and I loved the fact that these plays were so unrepentantly shallow: a bunch of silly characters emoting on stage through song and dance. The songs were meant to be catchy, the characters meant to be caricatures, the stories overly dramatic.

My point is that musical theater is immature, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you consider the Wiggles a good thing. Mind you, I am not speaking of content but rather form. Content, especially for musicals today, often push against the form, which delights most critics. Swooning over Sweeney Todd, critics find their adult political and cultural concerns satisfied by musicals about Vietnam vets (Miss Saigon), youthful lust (Spring Awakenings), or bipolar disorder (Next to Normal). This dissonance between form and content supposedly creates "art," at least until the backlash begins, in which critics lament the loss of the old Broadway charm, where songs were sung on stage in the service of flirting, double entendre, and parades. The musical, it seems, always belongs to a nostalgic order of Americana mixed with the desire to engage in some sort of mimesis. Brecht already discussed these issues all very well, and I am not pretending to have thought more about it than he has, but I am particularly interested in the way I see musical theater operating on a personal level, not theoretical.

I would argue that the sense of nostalgia that permeates musical theater is not so much for its Gershwin or Rogers and Hammerstienian past but rather for a nostalgia of one's own adolescent expression. The critics' desire that musicals take advantage of their lightness is the same kind of desire that the new James Bond lose his "darker" edge to go back to the lady-laying, martini drinking man of the past. The silliness of the premise calls for silliness. When musicals go for the emotionally and psychologically complicated terrain of "adult themes," you usually get what I consider even more silliness, like, if we are doing movie analogies, the "Dark Knight," in which serious philosophical questions are brought up by a man in a bat suit and a nitwit with white makeup. The veneer of seriousness is belied by the genre we enter, and it veers even closer to the absurd (again, Brecht knew this well). By the way, the whole idea of the musical Spiderman was a guarantee of its own doom: silliness (the superhero story of a man-spider) masked as seriousness (the Sam Raimi approach) mixed with a different silliness (the musical genre) masked as seriousness (the Phantom of the Opera syndrome) makes for crap, invariably. Too many masks, too little underneath them.

This is all to say that, although I could "enjoy" a good Broadway show, the form is inherently ridiculous (I'll save my comparisons to opera and ballet, which I see as more redeemable, for another time) and therefore seems to me to be artistic small beans, and always on the edge of parody, irony, and absurdity. I am rehearsing common arguments, and in response to arguments like this, there is often a push to take hold of the musical and return it to its childhood, pure sincerity, fun, over the top, melodic, and toe-tapping.

Mormon Culture (the unfortunate side):
Although I loved musical theater as a youth, I cringed at its imitators, especially those imitators that have more important fish to fry, like the fishes of Christianity and other serious religions. Nothing demeans religious devotion like a foray into superficial entertainment, and I often felt that my worship was insulted by the song and dance man. I understand that one of the methods of attracting people to religion is to make it initially appealing on a superficial level, and I also understand that this occasionally works, but I can't help but think that the religious soul that is attracted by toe-tapping and jazz hands has not found the part of their soul that persists in devotion. Unfortunately, I was often confronted by the version of religion that diminishes itself when I was growing up, and I guess I still do.

Mormons have a pageant culture, inviting, and cloying, by its happy voices and overt awe, burying subtlety under the faux pioneer dresses and suspenders. I never liked this--it is not my experience of devotion. Of course, religion, and spirituality, is as subjective as about anything. No, actually it's not; spirituality is dependent upon the means of its transfer. I subscribe in part to Macluhan's "medium is the message," particularly when it comes to a culture of tradition, ritual, and hierarchy as organized religion is. I am so often exposed, voluntarily or not, with a disneyfied version of the things I call sacred that I wonder if the object of my devotion is supposed to be Walt Disney (I had a mission companion that claimed he couldn't wait to get to the Celestial Kingdom to high five "my man Walt"). We are so taken by the visual stimulus, by the appealing catchiness of quick melody, the awe of human beings moving their feet and singing rhymed couplets that we push aside the kind of religion that relies on repetitive ritual, slow-moving hymns, and meditative devotion.

This, to me, is sad. But it is also a reality, so I need to actively seek the meditative among the frivolity, and it is often there if I make an effort to find it. The experience of Mormonism, though, is incredibly varied, not monolithic as in the eyes of the cultural critics, who see flash at the expense of the night-repenter or the home-teaching meal. But we do this to ourselves, I think. At the tail end of high school, I went to a Mormon visitor's center in Independence, Missouri, that had different rooms, one with a simulated flood, one a thunderstorm, and another a peaceful day. It was weird and already too trite and cynical for my 18-year-old yearning for religious experience (on the way to a mission to boot). I didn't need these simulations, I needed the real thing. Overt simulacra forces us to mistake structured, prescribed experience for real experience, and I still haven't forgiven that visitor's center for the nonsense.

But I am a true Mormon, active in family life, church life, and inner life. For me, questions of religion and theology have a lot at stake, they are not just idle fancies. I read poems by John Donne and George Herbert and identify with their sense that all of this stuff has meaning, profound meaning, and if we don't think hard enough about it, all that meaning gets lost in the surface play. It matters. Song and dance doesn't matter. It is entertaining, but it is not art nor religion.

Matt Stone-Trey Parker's The Book of Mormon
Matt Stone and Trey Parker have a lot to say about things. I choose the phrase carefully: they have a lot to say about "things"--material culture, pop culture, that. I admire their ability to turn conventional wisdom about culture on its head and do so in a way that makes its point that much more salient because of the humor. It's nothing if not good parody. They are also cartoonists. This is important, because cartoons are things, too: caricatures drawn rather than characters lived. They don't have a lot to say about non-things, the feelings, virtues, and consciousness that makes our experience much richer than the interchange of media products. They have little to say about humans, which aren't things and aren't cartoons.

Our laughter almost always comes from the recognition that "things" are usually absurd. The myths we tell about ourselves have contradictions that become glaring once they are highlighted in parody. Religion, or at least the experience of religion on its surface level, is definitely one of those things. In that way, it is the easy target of good comedy. I don't use "easy" derogatively, either, but just as a point. Mormons are even easier targets because,
1) the religion is relatively new
2) the American version of Mormonism is mostly white, square, and naive
3) its myths, although not stranger than other religion's, have the added burden of modernity
4) our public face is often, as I have suggested, Disney-fied.
The Disney-fied public face probably comes from overcompensation to assimilate into an intolerant American culture, and I believe that part of the religion will subside once that defensive reaction does, but the other things can't really be changed. I often imagine a parody that I would write of our religious culture, and it comes across in similar forms as the Parker-Stone parody does. In fact, my missionary companion and I, while in the MTC, went on a marathon run of doing all of our interactions in song, a heightened musical theater form that was overt satire at the sentimentality we saw around us. The result was, I'd suggest, just as potent a ribbing of our culture as the current musical, only more theologically and culturally precise. I can still sing you our invented chorus for our "moment of doubt" if you ask me too. At any rate, self-awareness is as alive and well in Mormon culture as it is in any other culture, but so is the reliance on a lack of self-awareness, again, as it is in any culture.

But let me just say that Parker and Stone are really good at nailing us on our superficialities, particularly our cultural fascination with Disney, cleanliness, trite slogans, homophobic femininity (a topic unexplored as of yet) and, well, musical theater. Fine, if I wasn't going to get the backing for my own parody musical, I'll leave it up to them (I sometimes wonder if they caught my 21st birthday party, in which my friends and I put on a musical of when Brigham Young said "This is the Place").

They do it all in the form it deserves, a musical, which is silly, trite, catchy, and inherently absurd. This I am okay with--it makes sense and for the first four or five songs of the musical, it is really effective. The musical then goes into the predictable vulgarity associated with its creators, which to me seems tired but to everyone else seemed edgy. "Hedgy" seems more like it (as in, "if the parody of this culture doesn't land, our jokes about scrotums can hedge our bets"). The rest of the musical is caught up in a kind of vulgarity that pits itself against the white-bread, Victorian sensibility of the clean cut Elders, and therefore it makes us laugh. But, what of it? Maybe the squareness of Mormon culture is its truly maverick ethos, a statement that would never be taken seriously amongst the easy insult of prudery and naivete.

To return to my earlier point, the praise of musical probably comes from its supposedly profound mixing of sensibilities, genres, and ironic modes. The music in the musical is more square than its central characters. It uses ditties and melodies that most of us create when trying to make up a song for our kids or mocking a commercial. It is uncomplicated, appealing, silly, catchy, danceable, uninteresting--just the kind of music that wins over the Broadway musical crowd. But the lyrics within the very conventional melodies are obscene, which cracks people up. This is a popular mode right now (see Adam Mansbach's "Go the F*** to Sleep"), and one that doesn't require much imagination, even if it is funny. Likewise, the conventional music paired with dirty words and irreverence predictably appeals to the theater critic who loves the form while loathing its outdated sentimentality. The Parker-Stone creation lands for the predictable critic on all levels, but again, my biggest critique is that all of these levels come from questions of form over content.

The content of religion--the ineffable profundity of it--is difficult to grapple with, which is why Stone and Parker didn't really do that. Their defenders claim that their take on religion is that it is productive in a secular humanist kind of way, but who would disagree with that? Anyone who has tried to live a religion honestly would not be surprised in the least that it does good for others. The conclusion seems self-evident, even if it is a concession on the part of pure parodists.

Where does this all leave us? I have not seen the show, so I don't know. I am mainly discussing the premise of the show here, the idea of the show and the form of the show without offering a detailed critique of depictions or plot points. I just thought I'd pose some questions about its existence as it quickly assimilates into pop culture; indeed, takes a prominent place in our pop culture. For much better critiques of the musical, ones that are well-articulated and thoughtful see David Brooks's excellent approach to the musical's view of religion and Jared Farmer's astute review from a religion historian's sense.

I am just thinking out loud. The quieter thinking I do is better served at church, I guess.