Josh Gad stepped back into The Book of Mormon at the 79th annual Tony Awards, joining Andrew Rannells and Rory O’Malley for a one-night reunion built around the musical’s 15th anniversary. The original cast performed “Man Up,” the closing number of act one, in a nod to the show that made them Broadway fixtures more than a decade ago.
The reunion landed at a moment when theater fans were already looking back at one of the biggest Broadway hits of the 2010s. The Book of Mormon won nine Tony Awards in 2011, including best musical, and Gad and Rannells were at the center of that run as Elder Cunningham and Elder Price. Now Kevin Clay and Diego Enrico lead those roles, with Sydney Quildon as Nabulungi, Charlie Franklin as Elder McKinley and Jacques C. Smith as Mafala Hatimbi.
Creators Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez introduced the performance, underscoring how firmly the show still belongs to the people who built it. The musical follows two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent to a remote Ugandan village, and its satire has kept it recognizable long after its first awards sweep.
There was also a sharper edge beneath the celebration. The Eugene O’Neill Theatre caught fire on May 4 and was closed for a few weeks before the production resumed on May 27, a disruption that briefly interrupted the show’s run just as the anniversary attention was building. That made the Tony Awards appearance feel less like a victory lap than a reminder that the production had to clear an unexpected hurdle before the applause returned.
Gad, Rannells, O’Malley, Parker, Lopez, Stone and Nikki M. James are set to return for eight performances from June 9 to June 14, and that is the next stage readers will want to watch. The Tony Awards reunion gave the anniversary its headline moment, but the coming performances will show whether the original cast still has room to surprise audiences beyond “Man Up.”
