《曲外之音》-百老汇最“下流”的上流音乐剧
Hi, everyone. And welcome back to the Sound of Musicals. 欢迎回来【曲外之音】. Hi, Oliver.
Hello, again.
This is Part Two of our discussion on the Book of Mormon.
Yeah, a great musical.
Albeit controversial, because on the surface it looks like it’s anti-religion, it’s saying that religions are stupid, but it's not necessarily so, is it？
No, it does look like that at first glance, but it's not being offensive towards religions. I don't think so. If you look below the surface of it, it is just kind of making a commentary on people's beliefs, not necessarily religion, but any people's beliefs; and it's not offensive to them, it's just using comedy as a way to discuss them.
I think it's not sort of criticizing religion as a concept, as a source of faith, source of hope, source of salvation.
But it's more satirizing some of the very rigid rituals certain religions have, or all religions have, and saying that we shouldn't be focusing on all of these minute details of a religion, but we should focus on why people have religion or have religious belief to start with. It is really to have that hope.
Yes, I agree. I think it is just making a comment on how people's beliefs might be a little bit unusual sometimes and may seem silly to others, but the outcome is that people have hope, they have belief.
This lets them get through terrible situations, whatever their hope is, whatever their belief is. It's a coping mechanism in many ways. And that is something that everybody needs, no matter how you find it.
Especially like the beginning and the end they use the same piece of music. Beginning it was saying the Book of Mormon, towards the end, it says the Book of Arnold, it doesn't matter whether it’s Book of Mormon or Book of Arnold. The idea is the same. It brings people hope.
Yeah, the fact the music is the same. It shows that religions whilst they may seem different and have different names, they have the same goal in a way, which is this hope that people have.
Yeah, and even for people who are self-claimed believers, and sometimes it's very difficult to say what they actually believe in. Is it the actual details about a certain god or certain deity, or is it more about the idea of religion？
For example, the villagers in Uganda, when Arnold Cunningham, one of the Mormon boys, when he was preaching, he added in a lot of nonsense, he added in a lot of Sci-Fi films and fantasy films. However, these people just believed him.
So eventually they were trying to say to the villagers Look, I'm so sorry that was not real. A lot of those things we said was nonsense. And then the villagers were saying you know what, we didn't take it literally. We took it metaphorically, we never thought those were the absolute truth what you were saying, but we just took it as part of the belief system and that's just metaphorical.
I think obviously we don't want to go into specific religions in the world now, but if you think about it, every religion has those stories. If you ask believers, do they truly believe in all of those stories that actually happened？Maybe not, but the messages these stories sent, they're very meaningful.
Yeah. They're very meaningful. I am not religious myself, but I like the messages that they bring the faith and the hope that they give to people.
But talking about that, actually a little bit about the music. One of the…perhaps can be construed as most offensive piece of music in this, is called Hasa Diga Eebowai.
Yeah, we were just talking about nice messages of hope. This is a message of hope. This is a coping mechanism. It fits perfectly into what we were talking about even if the language is appalling for some people.
Yeah.