One of the last major Broadway productions to reveal its reopening plans, The Book of Mormon, announced today that it will return to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on November 5. The musical, created by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez, first opened on March 24, 2011, went on to win nine Tony Awards including Best Musical, and has been a Broadway mainstay since then. It was also produced by Scott Rudin, who recently stepped back from his Broadway shows, including To Kill a Mockingbird. Producer Anne Garefino, who’s also an executive producer of South Park with Parker and Stone, took the lead position in a release announcing the show’s return, which did not mention Rudin.
The Book of Mormon’s South Park-esque satirical humor and ironic racism in its depiction of its Ugandan characters, criticized at the time, has aged especially poorly over the last decade. Last summer, in the midst of protests after the police killing of George Floyd and an internal reckoning over racism within Broadway, a group of Mormon’s Black cast members, both current and original, wrote a letter to its creative team asking them to reconsider its depiction of those characters. This March, the Daily Mail reported that Parker, Stone, and Lopez planned to gather for a workshop with actors involved in various versions of the production to revise the show. The production hasn’t yet made any announcements about whether changes will indeed be made to the production when it returns on Broadway or to the West End, where it’ll open November 15.