How the South Park creators and an Avenue Q writer built a Broadway giant
Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars workshopping a musical about two Mormon missionaries in Uganda, still unsure it would go anywhere. It opened on Broadway in March 2011, won nine Tonys, and has since grossed over $900 million.
The seed was planted in the summer of 2003. Parker and Stone, in New York to discuss their marionette film Team America: World Police, were urged by producer Scott Rudin to see Avenue Q, whose puppets resembled theirs. They went, and met its writer-composers, including Robert Lopez. Mormonism already fascinated the pair, who grew up in Colorado within the so-called Mormon corridor and had once sketched a fictional Joseph Smith for an abandoned Fox series. In 2006 they spent three weeks in London with Lopez, writing four or five songs and roughing out the story.
Lopez pushed for workshops, a theatre habit the South Park duo did not know. About six followed over four years, from half-hour showings for friends to far larger versions. The producers, Rudin and Anne Garefino, had planned a summer 2010 off-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop but chose to open straight on Broadway, reasoning that the writers do their best work with the stakes highest. Budgeted at $11 million, the show came in under, at $9 million. Andrew Rannells beat T. R. Knight and Nick Lachey for the lead, Elder Price, opposite Josh Gad.
The plot sends the confident Price, who has prayed for a posting to Orlando, Florida, to northern Uganda with the insecure, fibbing Elder Cunningham. Villagers there face famine, disease and a brutal warlord and show little interest in scripture. Songs came and went during development: one early number about how the third film in a trilogy is always best was rebuilt into All-American Prophet, and Family Home Evening was cut.
Its record is huge. Besides the Tonys, including Best Musical, it won a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, broke house records at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, and spawned a long West End run and US tours. By September 2026 it had played more than 5,000 performances, the ninth longest Broadway run. Lopez went on to write Disney hits, the songs of Frozen, its sequel and Coco, alongside his wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez. In 2020, Black cast members asked for revisions to avoid outdated tropes, and the script was changed.
Source: The Book of Mormon (musical)
