Missionaries and the Book of Mormon

I went to Book of Mormon expecting to have a good time and more vindication for my dislike of missionaries. I was really surprised to get a serious plot addressing a lot of major real issues.  Female genital mutilation and the belief that sex with virgins will cure HIV/AIDS (and destructive consequences resulting therefrom) are major plot points.  There is a musical with FGM as a major plot point. I have the astonishment.  I also felt far more empathy with the missionary Mormon elders than I expected.  The group of them sent to Uganda sing that when they have feelings they shouldn't feel, they simply turn those feelings off.  Then they take turns singing about the various abuses they have suffered or about being gay and conclude "turn it off."  Even when they all put on sparkly vests and tap dance at the end of the song, it's never quite just fun because I feel so bad for them. Later, it develops that the elders are largely motivated by avoiding horrifying hell dreams (though the hell dreams contain more tap dancing.) and I can't even be really irritated at the obvious obliviousness as all the U.S. missionaries sing "We are Africa."

The musical does hit on several of my major gripes with missionaries, the complete lack of any meaningful training and accountability, the continuing to go where many missionaries have gone before, promising a better place, and then just leaving to their world more full of luxury and infrastructure.  Also, and related to lack of training and accountability, missionaries can, and do, tell people anything whatsoever and for some reason are often accepted as authorities.  My friend the VA nurse, with whom I was attending Book of Mormon, told me that at one point she was stationed in Honduras and there were a large number of women feeding their babies sugar water in bottles because some missionaries had told them breastfeeding was bad.  So while the musical's solutions to problems like FGM and raping virgiins to cure HIV/AIDS is to use missionaries to just tell people that god says these things shouldn't happen, that doesn't lead to so happy an ending as it could, because, well, this is set in Uganda.  In Uganda, missionaries get people killed for being gay.  Just having some not evil missionaries around is not enough.

As a musical it hangs together very well.  There's a lot of show stopping numbers and funny moments, interspersed with the sad realities of life.   My favorite thing, however, may be that that the Latter Day Saints actually advertise in the playbill.  Multiple times.  They are actually contributing lots of money to this musical. Fabulous.