Hill Cumorah Pageant

There are some performances you want to see more than once. For me, it’s: almost anything by Stephen Sondheim, Chess, any of my favorite pieces danced by the New York City Ballet, Hamilton, and Book of Mormon. Speaking of which…

My dancer friend Colleen and I have joked about going to see the Hill Cumorah Pageant for a couple of years, and finally decided to brave it. I’d never heard of it until moving to Rochester. But it’s obviously a big pilgrimage site for the Mormons, as evidenced by the myriad license plates in the parking lot (I only played the license plate game for about five minutes, and in addition to New York and neighboring states, checked off both Carolinas, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Utah (of course), Washington, D.C., and even Ontario and Mexico!

One of Colleen’s friends warned us that if we went too early, we’d be approached with an attempt to proselytize. I couldn’t wait. Her husband, Bill, who accompanied us, was less mocking, and was probably glad that the wandering evangelizing cast avoided us entirely. It was a lovely Friday evening, and the audience seemed to be at least a couple thousand people (the website says there is seating for 9,000!).

Since the Mormons wouldn’t come to me, I went to one of them, and learned that there were approximately 750 people in the cast, some from as far away as Switzerland (are there really Mormons in Switzerland?!). They rehearse for a week, then perform for two weekends of shows. They all looked very Kool-Aid-happy as they walked around with their pamphlets, despite a tiny group of men roadside, protesting that the Mormons aren’t “true Christians,” whatever that means…

The spectacle began with a prayer, and then an introduction:  “This is the true story…” The plot seemed hard to follow and hard to swallow. Apparently, after an improbable crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from some unnamed “wilderness” close to Israel, 600 B.C.E., a family (a couple with four sons and their wives, which should have produced a nice batch of inbred offspring in several generations) settles in America (North or South unclear): the new promised land. The assertion that they became a great nation with cities and temples is fantastical in light of the profound lack of evidence of either. How did they manage not to have any documented interaction with any Native Americans? How did this become a legitimate religion? The stories are as colorful as the costumes, and extremely melodramatic.

While I’m glad to have checked this off my list, once is definitely more than enough.