Name: "They Were Super Nice About It" - How the Mormon Church Reacted To "The Book of Mormon"
Uploaded: 2026-03-22T17:02:47.000Z
Duration: 6 min 58 s
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Hey, everybody, we're back with the creators of the Book of Mormon, Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and

To-infinitive

Well, I want to know especially, especially from you, were you jealous to find out that in 2005, Trey, you got this.

You have a letter here from Stephen Sondheim.

At the end of it, he says, would you ever be interested in writing a stage musical with an old traditionalist, namely me?

What an extraordinary thing this was to receive.

Trey has that up in his office, by the way.

He wrote me a letter and he, same way, typed it up himself.

And he wrote me after the south park movie and said, that's the greatest musical I've seen in a long, long time.

And then he wrote that one as a second one because I don't know if I responded to the first one.

But you mirrored doing that and said, no, I'd rather write this Mormon musical.

Well, I mean, then we met, we did this whole thing, and

then the next time I actually saw him, we were doing one of the workshops for Book of Mormon and we're watching it up and I'm sitting next to this guy and I'm like, that's Stephen Sondheim sitting right next to me.

Well, reviewers have called the Book of Mormon more foul mouthed than a David Mamet on a blue streak.

What's the moment in the show when you were first showing it to people when you knew, like, this is the moment in the show that people would either love it or hate it because you had to know that you were going to challenge the border of that.

So I think, is there one moment in that it's like, oh, this is the tipping point for people.

Well, the one in act one is Hasadiga Iboi.

When the boys get to Africa and they meet the villagers, they hear their saying, and

And the first live audience that saw that, what was the reaction?

Were you, well, everybody, I mean, theater is cool.

I mean, Trey and I hadn't had as Much experience as Bobby.

But you've got to put these workshops up and see people respond to it, you know what I mean?

Over and over before you get to Broadway.

one lady just looked around at everyone, took her play bill and threw it down.

It's just a thing on paper without a great cast.

How did you find Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells?

He was in the very first reading, and I. I cast him off of a list of names.

So the casting director gave me a list, and I was like, who's Josh Gad?

And she said, oh, he's from Spelling Bee.

And then I realized, oh, it was a different guy.

Well, Andrew's gonna be out here in just a minute.

He's gonna sing I Believe Tonight, which is a fantastic song.

What do y' all remember about writing Believe?

I remember it being one of the last things we wrote.

We were still working on other pieces, but

it was a part where we actually didn't even have a song.

And we were like, you know, someone was telling us, like, there's gotta be a song here.

And we basically were like, I don't know.

And Bobby goes, remember the beginning of Sound of Music?

And I was like, oh, yeah, let's just do that.

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"They Were Super Nice About It" - How the Mormon Church Reacted To "The Book of Mormon"

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