Here’s an exercise for you. Put, in any order you want, the following words and phrases together: hip new prophet, Donny Osmond flair, part three to the Bible, Return of the Jedi, paradise on the West Coast, why are you letting me die, I have maggots in my scrotum. Only the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in collaboration with Robert Lopez (Frozen), could put them in such an order as to lead to one of the songs* from the Tony Award-winning musical The Book of Mormon.

Hello! Elder Price, Elder Cunningham, Elder McKinley are back in town. The touring company of The Book of Mormon begins performances on February 18th at the Ahmanson Theatre where the show will continue through March 29th. Two days after closing in Los Angeles, the show will open at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco (where performances run from March 31st to April 26th.)

If you haven’t seen The Book of Mormon, this irreverent musical won nine Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Score of a Musical and Best Director.

The musical depicts a group of young Mormon missionaries awaiting their assignments. Elder Price (Liam Tobin), the “Golden Boy,” dreams of an assignment to Orlando, Florida. Instead he gets Uganda. Not only that, he is paired with a chronic liar, Elder Cunningham (Jordan Matthew Brown), who is the loudest and most obnoxious of all the missionaries. The only thing that gets more intense than Cunningham’s lies are the outrageous circumstances that has the missionaries encountering warlords and facing issues such as female genital mutiliation, HIV/AIDS and famine. And a Scary Mormon Hell Dream.

Yes, this is a comedy. An outrageously funny one. What else would you expect from the guys who gave us South Park? But there is also a heart. A rather surprising one.

There is a shock value in much of the humor. How much you enjoy the show on repeated viewings may be linked to what impact shock humor has on you more than once.

For tickets at the Ahmanson Theatre go here.

For tickets in San Francisco go here.

*The phrases used above come from the song All-American Prophet

Photo:  Tsilala Brock, Liam Tobin and Jordan Matthew Brown in “The Book of Mormon.” (Photo by Julieta Cervantes/Courtesy of Center Theatre Group)

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