"The production is every bit as good as the one I saw on Broadway when the show first opened there almost exactly two years ago, proving that we’re now equal in every way to New York in delivering a production of flair and flourish. But it has also been a triumph of marketing to raise the consciousness of the public here so that it is already the most talked about show in London.
The good news is that the talk isn’t hot air. This show is the real deal, but as such it does it a disservice to make too many ridiculous claims for it. The initial momentum that has been created now seems unstoppable, and the show has already extended booking through to August next year. It will be around even longer than that."
- Mark Shenton, The Stage
"Elders Price and Cunningham are played by Gavin Creel and Jared Gertner respectively – both stars from the US tour and, in Gertner’s case, the Broadway production – and they’re both fantastic. Creel (who bears more than a slight resemblance to a young Mitt Romney, appropriately enough) is that rare thing, a funny straight man – while Gertner is an utter delight as his rotund sidekick and would-be best friend, exuding a childish innocence and enthusiasm reminiscent of South Park’s Butters. The American leads are supported by a terrific British company, too – most notably the funny, pure-voiced Alexia Khadime, who plays Ugandan village girl Nabulungi (whose name gets macerated as the show goes on - running jokes being another of Parker and Stone’s strengths); and Stephen Ashfield, who’s a stand-out as both the elder leading the Ugandan mission and the Angel Moroni himself."
- Andrea Mann, Huffington Post UK
"Parker and Stone have created something spirited and refreshing. True, in Mormonism they’ve chosen a soft target. As an attack on the more arcane aspects of religious piety it’s not got that much bite. But it is rich in absurdity and ecstatic weirdness – and has been imbued by co-directors Parker and Casey Nicholaw with athletic zing, precisely delivered by a cast that includes sharp supporting turns from Giles Terera, Alexia Khadime and Chris Jarman."
- Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard
"Essentially this is an odd-couple buddy musical. Kevin Price is a handsome confident young Mormon from Salt Lake City but on his first evangelising mission he finds himself partnered with the fat, nerdy, needy Arnold who has a habit of making things up. Predictably, it is Arnold who makes progress with the Ugandans, largely by bending his religion to suit their needs, while Price cracks up and dreams he has gone to hell. There are also camp pageant scenes depicting some of the more outlandish aspects of the Mormon faith, and the show concludes with the glibly predictable moral that it is better to believe in something, no matter how absurd, than to believe in nothing at all."
- Charles Spencer, The Telegraph
"From Casey Nicholaw’s kitsch choreography to the sheer detail of a book that hops with elan from Biblical Egypt to eighteenth-century America to a sort of vaginal version of hell, this is a tremendous show, as accomplished as it is funny. It also has as hard-working, well-drilled and odd-looking an ensemble as you’ll see on the West End."
- Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out London
"Helplessly funny and terrifically entertaining, The Book Of Mormon is a foul-mouthed love letter to one’s fellow man that suggests where to shove God in two different languages."
- Metro
"This is Frankie Boyle with jazz hands, sequins and a carefree smile. Unlike Boyle, it is sharp hilarious comedy which doesn’t shock or offend needlessly."
- Alun Palmer, The Mirror
"The premise of the show is that religion is just the continuation of showbiz by other means. It’s a view that can be applied more readily to televangelism than to, say, the patient, collectively questing silence of a Quaker meeting. But the idea pays dividends at certain points in the piece, as when the Mormon team in Uganda sing a frenetically fusspot ditty about the repression of instincts (in their case very gay). Stephen Ashfield is hilarious as the team-leader whose maniacal cheeriness of surface is given to sudden surges of raw camp as the Lord and the current take him."
- Paul Taylor, The Independent
150,000 The Book Of Mormon tickets released today!