In the 30th-anniversary year of the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS, it's interesting to note that the Broadway shows The Book of Mormon and The Normal Heart, two strong contenders for 2011 Tony Awards, both touch upon the still-incurable disease in utterly different ways.
Seeing both shows on the same day during a recent trip to New York offered up an unexpected and unsettling chance to reflect on the way that each dramatized HIV/AIDS ( and to generally weigh in on the merits of both critically acclaimed productions ) .
The Book of Mormon seems guaranteed to triumph when the Tony Awards are handed out on Sunday, June 12 ( broadcast on CBS-TV at 7 p.m. ) . The Book of Mormon leads the musical field with 14 Tony Award nominations, which is the second highest number of nominations in the history of the Tony Awards after the 15 nods The Producers received in 2001. Although The Normal Heart has just five nominations, many Tony handicappers are predicting that Larry Kramer's seminal 1985 AIDS drama is favored to win the trophy for best revival of a play.
The AIDS references in The Book of Mormon are all played for gallows-humor laughs. But what would you expect when you look at the credentials of the show's creators?
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the hypocrisy-exposing jokesters behind the award-winning animated TV comedy series South Park, are making their Broadway debut with The Book of Mormon. Joining Stone and Parker for his second Broadway show is Robert Lopez, a Tony Award-winning co-creator of the hit 2003 Sesame Street-spoof musical Avenue Q.
Let's just say that The Book of Mormon lives up the authors' infamous reputations in terms of delivering a smartly irreverent and uproarious profanity-filled show that gently mocks its characters while being simultaneously sweet about them. As expected, Stone, Parker and Lopez rightly take aim at many of the quirkier aspects of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ( official name of the Mormon church ) , but it's not a mean-spirited exercise religion bashing since the show also emphasizes the positive aspects of faith and devotion.
Boy, are the beliefs of its leading characters supremely tested in The Book of Mormon. Golden boy Elder Price ( a freshly scrubbed and powerfully voiced Andrew Rannells ) isn't so happy when he's paired up with a sci-fi loving and known liar companion like Elder Cunningham ( goofball Josh Gad ) . Both missionaries are sent to civil war-torn Uganda, where they are at a loss to find lessons from their faith to cope with the country's rampant problems including poverty, murderous warlords, female genital mutilation and disgustingly bizarre AIDS superstitions.
Book of Mormon co-directors Parker and Casey Nicholaw ( who is also the show's choreographer ) bring out plenty of staging flash for this joke-filled and often deliberately juvenile fish-out-of-water story, but they help to keep emotion genuine for the conflicted ( albeit generalized ) characters.
Although the score to The Book of Mormon is relentlessly catchy and funny, one could quibble about the authors' lack of originality since they are all far too keen to make so many of their songs meta parodies of numbers from other musicals. Hence the God-cursing song "Hasa Diga Eebowai" is actually scathing spoof of The Lion King's "Hakuna Matata," or how the "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" apes the style and irreverence of the Hades-set Act II of Jerry Springer: The Opera.
Also, there's no doubt that the Act II number "Joseph Smith America Moses" is directly inspired by the "Small House of Uncle Thomas" sequence from The King and I. But the whole number serves as a hilarious summation that highlights how religious stories can be used to help people in troubled times and situations.
If The Book of Mormon's characters' lack of concrete information about preventing HIV/AIDS offers gross-out humor in The Book of Mormon, it's much more outrage-inducing in The Normal Heart. Larry Kramer's 1985 drama The Normal Heart has all the power of a from-the-trenches dispatch in a terrifying battle where there is little-to-no official help in fighting the murderous enemy of AIDS.
In depicting the start of the AIDS epidemic in New York between 1981 and 1984, Kramer fashioned The Normal Heart into an angry indictment of the deplorable inaction by the administrations of President Ronald Regan and New York City Mayor Ed Koch. However, Kramer also takes aim at the gay community for its rampant internalized homophobia that hindered a successful mobilization to get information out about the stigmatizing disease.
Directors George C. Wolfe and Joel Grey keep things powerfully simple in this staging set largely in set designer David Rockwell's simple white box environment that is filled with bas-relief text and newspaper headlines about the AIDS crisis. The starry cast drawn from stage, screen and TV fame brings great passion to Kramer's fact-stuffed text, straddling the play's difficult tone of didacticism and wrenching emotion without going overboard in either direction.
Actor-turned-director Joe Mantello returns to his roots by portraying a very human Ned Weeks, the agitating and often irritating fictional stand-in for Kramer himself. Equally impassioned is Ellen Barkin as the feisty Dr. Emma Brookner, whose tough-love arguments for abstinence are understandably brushed off as unreasonable.
Though a period piece, The Normal Heart remains vital as a rallying call for the LGBT community to continue to fight for its rights and to not backslide when it comes to the dead-serious matter of battling the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The Book of Mormon plays in an open run at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York. Visit bookofmormonbroadway.com for more information. The Normal Heart plays in a limited run through July 10 at the John Golden Theatre in New York. Visit www.thenormalheartbroadway.com for more information.
Please send theater news and other related tidbits to scottishplayscott@yahoo.com or Andrew@windycitymediagroup.com .
