‘Book of Mormon’ spoofs faith ‘South Park’ style

It was, as they say, a fateful night.

“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had gone to see “Avenue Q” not long after it opened on Broadway during the summer of 2003.

Robert Lopez, who wrote “Avenue Q” with Jeff Whitty and Jeff Marx, noticed his “South Park” idols in the audience. So he invited them out for drinks. During their conversation, Parker and Stone asked Lopez what he wanted to do next. “Something about the Mormons,” he replied.

As Lopez remembers, the two responded in unison: ” ‘Are you kidding me? That’s what we have been talking about doing for 10 years! ’ ”

And that is how the creators of “The Book of Mormon,” the scabrous account of two young Mormon missionaries’ journey to Uganda, found one another. And how Lopez came to write his second smash hit. (Both “Avenue Q” and “Book of Mormon” won best musical Tonys, and Lopez has won three Tonys for his writing.)

“The Book of Mormon” — which swept the 2011 Tony Awards with nine wins — arrives at the Fox Theatre on Tuesday and continues through Feb. 9.

Lopez — who grew up as a devout Roman Catholic but began “to notice a lot of inconsistencies within the Bible” while in college — said he had always been fascinated by the Mormons, “because to me that was the most ridiculous (religion) of them all.”

That said, Lopez is quick to say that the point of the show is not to make fun of Mormons.

“It’s just about telling a story about these two guys and about their religion,” Lopez said. It so happens that the church’s practice of pairing up young male elders to do two years of missionary service is a handy device for framing a tale.

In “Book of Mormon,” fresh-faced Elder Kevin Price (played by Mark Evans at the Fox) is packed off to Uganda with the socially challenged Elder Arnold Cunningham (Christopher John O’Neill).

The elders’ attempts to convert the natives to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints go wildly amok — and involve encounters with an angry warlord, a village chieftain and his nubile daughter. The villagers live in horrific conditions where AIDS, poverty, famine, war, female circumcision and political repression are a way of life, and those sad circumstances are exploited to tasteless and raunchy effect by the show’s creators.

Lopez jokes that the structure is just like “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson’s sunny slice of Americana about a character named Harold Hill, a crooked musical-instrument salesman who dupes a town. “These guys come to town, and the town has a problem,” he says of the young Mormon elders. “And they’ve got a solution. But it doesn’t really work the way they think it’s going to work.”

It would be a disservice to give too much plot away. So let’s just say that Cunningham is ill prepared for being a missionary. He hasn’t even read The Book of Mormon, so he makes stuff up. That leads to comic bedlam and, in the end, a kind of redemption.

O’Neill says one of the great joys of performing the role is watching audience members go from buttoned-up to euphoric. “They look like they are a little offended, and then by the end of that number, they are the first ones up dancing,” O’Neill says.

“They (Stone and Parker) are the writers of ‘South Park,’” O’Neill says of the popular, profanity-laced Comedy Central cartoon and 1999 feature film. “So, of course, it is going to make some people uncomfortable at times. But what’s so surprising about this musical is that it actually has heart. The structure of the musical is actually like a really good musical-theater piece.” (See 1957’s “The Music Man.”)

As it turns out, the Mormons have embraced “The Book of Mormon” for its marketing potential. The church has placed ads in theater playbills, showing a photo of a supposed church member with the quotation: “I’ve read the book.”

“Their response has always been very gracious to any kind of satire because they realize the same laws that protect us protect them and their right to practice,” says Lopez, who along with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, has received an Oscar nomination for writing the music for the Disney film “Frozen.”

“So it’s really a very American institution.”