Oliver Burkeman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: The Book of Mormon, the much-applauded musical from the creators of South Park, officially opened in London last week – and like the grinning, clean-cut missionaries whose story it relates, it's been getting some baffled reactions from the locals. Well, the ones who work as professional theatre critics, anyway. I saw it on Broadway last spring, and can't recall a more purely hilarious and heart-warming evening in years. But the Telegraph's Charles Spencer found it "hard to warm to", "decadent" and "self-indulgent". My colleague Michael Billington, though deeming it "perfectly pleasant", also called it "essentially a safe, conservative show for middle America", awarding three stars out of five. Quentin Letts, of the Mail, called it "cowardly, coarse, cynical" and "worth avoiding"; in the Times, Libby Purves found it "morally null" and even "pretty racist".
2 comments:
I have always been very curious as to how shows that begin over seas differentiate from the original production when brought to America, or vice-versa. From what I have seen and read, it seems like the big shows that travel across seas do not change at all. It is interesting to think about how the different audiences will react to the same piece of theatre. With traveling shows, I am always interested in how the different areas and audiences will receive the piece, and after reading this piece, I wonder if other productions have had less than seamless oversea transitions. For instance, MATILDA just came from London after winning practically every award London had to offer... I wonder how it is being received in America!
I think this makes sense. I can see that people in certain areas of the United States would not mesh well with Book of Mormon, let alone in the UK. I've never spent any time in the UK, so this is all just generalization and hearsay, but thye usually don't go for something that is SO purely American suck as Book of Mormon. I can't imagine that South Park really lands with the UK audience either. Things that are so crass to the point of being offensivel hilarious seem to be a child of the USA. I don't see anything of the like being born out of other countries. Likewise, a lot of very prevalent US social issues are addressed in Book of Mormon. I can imagine that those issues don't hit as close to home for UK audiences, and therefore seem less funny. A lesson for all to take from this would be that humor is all relative.
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