Reviews
The Book of Mormon Loves Musicals More Than You!
As everyone with a modicum of intelligence knows, musicals are the highest form of art. Nowhere is this more gleefully affirmed than in The Book of Mormon, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez’s audacious Broadway juggernaut. On the surface, it’s exactly what you might expect from the minds behind South Park: irreverent, blasphemous, and more than a little crude. Yet beneath the outrageous gags and taboo-poking humour lies a deeply affectionate celebration of the musical as an art form.
What makes The Book of Mormon remarkable is how fully it embraces, and even worships, the classic structures of musical theatre. Its opening number, “Hello,” is a pitch-perfect parody of the “welcome to our world” trope, while songs like “You and Me (But Mostly Me)” and “Turn It Off” directly echo Broadway traditions, from bombastic hero duets to tap-dancing showstoppers. Every number, no matter how shocking the lyrics, is staged with a knowing wink to the lineage of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, and even Disney. The satire may cut deep, but it is built on reverence.
The crude jokes, then, aren’t ends in themselves but tools to remind us of the enduring optimism and transformative power of the genre. Even when the story veers into absurdity, the characters remain grounded in that classic musical tradition: dreamers who believe, against all odds, that song and faith (whether in God, in friendship, or in storytelling itself) can change the world. In its final moments, when the missionaries find new meaning through myth-making, the show slyly suggests that belief and theatre share the same DNA: both demand a suspension of disbelief, and both, at their best, can give people hope.
Far from mocking the genre, The Book of Mormon exalts it. Its irreverence is a disguise for devotion, its vulgarity a counterpoint that makes its earnestness shine all the brighter. This is not just a comedy about religion, it is a love letter to musicals themselves, reminding us that no matter how cynical the world becomes, there is nothing quite as subversively powerful as a chorus line singing in perfect harmony
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble.
Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
The present is in meltdown, but the causes lie deep in the past. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the car crash twelve months before Cass was born? To the infamous bee sting which ruined Imelda’s wedding day? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, trembling before his father in the garden, learning how to be a real man?
Is it possible that a single moment of bad luck set in motion everything that came after? And does that mean the fate of the Barnes family is already sealed? They are facing a reckoning. If they can’t change the past, or rewrite the story they have already lived, is it too late for a happy ending?
Review – 8/10
This is a sprawling family drama filled with chaos and insanity, tragedy and comedy. Four lives related by blood, yet distanced by circumstance, history and viewpoint.
It is quite long (almost 650 pages in hardback) but it doesn’t really feel it because it constantly confounds your expectations, often by applying truth to a situation where you had expected a cliché or for sensible realisation to overcome cheap or gimmicky plotting.
And the writing is fabulous. The protagonists have their own literary style and Murray has fun with this. The way he’s structured the book is clever too, as it slowly and thoroughly introduces us to each of the main characters and their foibles and then accelerates by switching from one to the other faster and faster until the climax is almost unbearably quickfire and tense.
Once I had settled in to Murray’s writing I thought it was almost magically skilful how I could understand with absolute certainty that he meant one thing even though the text said the exact opposite.
It’s also very funny in places and made me laugh quite unexpectedly: “And yet when you look at her looking at you all kinds of words come into your head – words like minge.”
I haven’t seen Interstellar yet, but…
A review of Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, written by Catherine Nixey can be found here: Interstellar review from the Times
I felt compelled to respond.
Dear Catherine,
I am writing in regard to your article about “Interstellar” in Friday’s edition of Times 2 and your ludicrous assertion that love does not transcend time and space. For this to be backed up by so called experts is even more galling.
Firstly there’s a mistake in how time passing quicker works. It’s more to do with how fast you’re travelling in relation to another point in space. As your relative velocity approaches the speed of light your mass approaches infinity and your journey through time slows to zero. So effectively if you could travel at light speed you would, in your relative framework, be travelling at infinite speed because however far you travelled, it would only take zero seconds. But to an observer on Earth (say) time would pass normally and he would see you travelling at only the speed of light…
So, if love exists, and can be defined as the connection between two or more souls, we need to explore if distance over space or a difference of time frames affects the strength of this connection, affects how much you love your observer back on Earth.
From personal, empirical evidence of my love I know that no matter how far I am from my children or better half the strength of it does not weaken with distance. And I also know that it does not weaken over time.
So surely, given these two obvious facts, that it does not diminish no matter where or when you are in the universe then by definition love does transcend time and space. QED.
Best regards
Simon