The Book of Mormon at 15: Inside Broadway’s Global Hit With Associate Director Jennifer Werner

Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez’s uproarious musical comedy The Book of Mormon is celebrating 15 years on Broadway. Very few can say they’ve been with the show since the beginning, which is part of what makes Jennifer Werner so exceptional. Werner serves as the worldwide Supervising Associate Director for the hit production, overseeing the Broadway, West End and Australian stagings of the show as well as the North American tour. The Broadway Show correspondent Perry Sook stopped by the Eugene O’Neill Theatre to talk with Werner about her history with the show. As part of a peek into Werner's day-to-day responsibilities, Sook was privy to the theater vet sharing notes with Kevin Clay and Diego Enrico, who play Elder Price and Elder Cunningham, respectively.

“I’m in charge of all of the creative content of The Book of Mormon worldwide,” says Werner of what her job title entails. “I work with all of the actors, the understudies, the swings. I communicate with all of the stage managers, the company managers, the musicians, the crew, the designers, the producers.”

Though Werner has always been involved in theater, she found her way into behind-the-scenes work by happenstance, having previously been a swing for the 1998 revival of Cabaret. “I started out as a performer on Broadway and I met [Book of Mormon co-director and choreographer] Casey Nicholaw doing a show and we just hit it off," she says. "He asked me to be his assistant with another production and then another, so I was working with him quite a bit, and that's how I came into this production with him."

The longevity of a Broadway production can be difficult to predict, but Werner sensed something was afoot when she saw how theatergoers took to the material when the show first premiered in 2011. “I think we knew [it would be a success] when we opened Broadway with just the response from the audience. It wasn't just one type of person. It was literally across the board.”

The far-reaching scope of The Book of Mormon has provided Werner with a theatrical community that stretches across the globe. “It’s a really wonderful job because I think theater people are the same everywhere, no matter what country you go to, and it's really cool that we are all sort of the same in that way and we have this big Mormon family everywhere.”

While most long-running shows are set in stone, Werner discloses that The Book of Mormon is an ever-evolving piece that keeps her on her toes. “You do your normal process in previews before it opens on Broadway and [the show] changes quite a bit as the writers are making changes during that initial period,” says Werner. “When we came back from the pandemic, we did a lot of rewriting. We did about seven weeks of rewrites with a lot of input from our cast and our alumni cast and then we have little tiny tweaks here and there, even now.”

In spite of her years-long commitment to the project, Werner has not grown tired of those merry doorbell ringers and their misadventures. “It's just an amazing production and the comedy is so South Park, but it has this traditional musical theater structure and it's about universal love and acceptance. That plays everywhere.” Speaking to how she feels about the original cast members returning in honor of the milestone anniversary, Werner says, “I'm in a unique position in that I actually know everybody and I've worked with everybody, so I'm really thrilled to see people that I haven't seen in years who have been off on new adventures. And I've been cheering them on in all of their new endeavors and making sure that we're all having a great time. We all just love each other so much.”

Watch full interview below:

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