'Book Of Mormon' Wins Best Musical, 9 Tony Awards

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

The Book of Mormon won nine Tony Awards last night including best musical, best director, and others.

The satiric musical was a Broadway debut for Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the famed creators of Comedy Central's South Park. Parker and Stone met at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the early 90's and have been wrecking hilarious havoc ever since.

More here, with video.

I've heard that, back when the South Park movie was out, famed Broadway guy Stephen Sondheim said it was the best musical of the year. I've always chuckled about that. I mean, it's a good movie, funny, rousing songs and whatnot, uses Satan as a central character, but it's not brilliant or anything, just a whole lot of fun: it seems to me that Sondheim's comment was more about how shitty Broadway musicals have become over the last three decades or so than about lavish praise for South Park.

But here we have Parker and Stone totally dominating this year's Tony Awards, about which I almost never care. Now, of course, I haven't yet seen The Book of Mormon because, you know, it's in New York and I'm in New Orleans, but I imagine it's a good show, probably lots of fun without much pretension, and I'm definitely going to check it out when it finally goes on tour. But the Tonys this year do interest me because a couple of guys who are essentially total theater outsiders just waltzed into that world of upturned noses and essentially bloodied them all. Just by doing their goofy irreverent philosophical thing, which nobody else in bigtime theater land has even thought about doing.

I respectfully suggest that the American professional theater has totally run out of ideas and desperately needs a massive infusion of fresh blood from outside its navel-gazing circles. Couldn't hurt.

Actually, what I mean is that Andrew Lloyd Webber sucks big donkey dicks.

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