What's Up, Trey Parker and Matt Stone? The Book of Mormon Scribes on Their Broadway Debut, South Park and Tony Plans
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have often looked to the world of musical theater for inspiration. In 1999 they teamed with Tony-winning Hairspray composer Marc Shaiman to craft songs for the big screen's South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and 2004's Team America: World Police featured an outrageously memorable send-up of Rent. Now the duo is stepping up to the Great White Way themselves, collaborating with Tony-winning Avenue Q songwriter Robert Lopez for their debut musical The Book of Mormon. As they ready for the show's March 24 opening at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, Parker and Stone chatted with Broadway.com about their first foray onto Broadway, poking fun at religion and whether they have any stunts planned for this year's Tony Awards ceremony.
There’s a song featuring the lyrics “Fuck You, God” in The Book of Mormon. Do you guys ever feel like you’re going too far?
Matt Stone: This definitely isn’t the most out there thing we’ve done. It’s actually pretty tame compared to some of our other stuff. We’ve had people shitting on other people on South Park and there’s not really any of that in this.
Trey Parker: Part of the fun when we set out to make the show was saying, ‘How can we make a classic, good musical?’ It wasn’t about how can we offend people. But there is something very different about writing [dialogue] for South Park and then making Cartman say it compared to when we wrote something for [Book of Mormon] and then gave it to the cast members. When the actors say lines back to you and you’re sitting four feet away, you think, ‘Woah! I can’t believe you said that!’ There’s something really fun about it being a live experience and being a bit naughtier in the theater, but yeah, we’ve definitely done more hardcore stuff.
Who were some of your musical influences for this show?
TP: We’re really doing an old Rodgers and Hammerstein-type show here. My favorite musicals have always been those old classics like Oklahoma! that I grew up seeing in community theaters or on VHS. The show is very happy-go-lucky like those [classics] it just happens to be Mormons doing all the singing.
What is your creative process like?
MS: We really did this like an album. We wanted the songs to be really important and make sense together as a whole. It was almost like we were a band between us and [co-composer] Bobby Lopez and Bruce Howell, our sound guy from South Park. We’d sit at our laptop and write the lyrics then create a demo version on Pro Tools. It was pretty cool.
South Park has parodied Mormons several times. Did you have to go back and do even more research for this?
MS: We started working on this project in 2004 and for every plot point we’ve had to go, "Well, what does the Book of Mormon actually say about this and what are these people’s beliefs?" But really, for any subject matter you want to research these days, all you have to do is go on the Internet. You can just go online and in six seconds have your all your questions answered. The Church [of Latter-Day Saints] is actually pretty tech savvy. You can download the whole Book of Mormon online so it’s almost like the Church made it very easy on us to write the show.
TP: We also did a lot of research on Joseph Smith and traveled to his birthplace and to upstate New York where [Mormons believe] he found the golden plates.
Popular Broadway shows often have national tours. How do you think the reaction will be if your musical plays Salt Lake City?
TP: They will go wild for it in there. We originally almost just thought, "Screw it, let’s just open it there."
Have you heard from any Mormons who’ve seen the show?
TP: There were some at the first or second preview and they loved it. I think the show is different than what people are expecting in that it doesn’t really take swipes at Mormons. The Mormons kind of save the day in our show. There’s a couple of lines in the show, some we didn’t even really put in on purpose, but when they stick and you hear a few laughs, you can tell from the reaction, "Oh, there’s a bunch of Mormons."
How did you feel the first time you saw the show up and running?
MS: We ran it through the first time about two days before the invited dress [rehearsal], and there wasn’t a single emotion to describe it. It was a real trip—
You attended the 2000 Oscars dressed as Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow. Do you have plans for any similar stunts at this year’s Tony Awards?
MS: We’re too old for shit like that now. We like the fact that we did that at the Oscars, but we don’t have the energy anymore. That’s the kind of shit you do when you’re 30 not 40.
TP: Plus, we think the Tonys are actually pretty cool. We just want to get in suits and shake hands with people.
So what’s next for you guys?
TP: Vacation. We really need a vacation. We really only have about a week to purge this all out of our heads before we have to go back and deliver seven episodes of South Park.
MS: This experience and the whole process of [writing a musical] has been great, but we’re a little burned out. Aside from the [labor] of it, all this has been very emotionally intense, just to create something and then put it up in front of people. It’s almost even been hard to fall asleep at night because you’re always thinking about it.
Can South Park fans expect to see your new lives as Broadway composers come into play next season?
MS: Probably not. We’re definitely going to switch gears. We always like to try to do something completely different.
Would you like to write another Broadway show in the future?
TP: Maybe, but we have no plans to right now. The way we work is we usually wait for an idea to come to us and then we go from there. Like we said we need a vacation, so the only real musical we’ll be writing any time soon will be performed sitting down with a ukulele on a beach in Hawaii.
