NEW YORK (AP) — It's been 12 years since Nikki M. James was last in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway starring in “The Book of Mormon.” So much has changed and yet some things are exactly the same.
“The sink in my dressing room is still clogged,” the Tony Award-winner says, laughing. “You can’t run the water that long. I don't know what it is. What's happening?”
James and fellow original co-star Rory O’Malley have returned to “The Book of Mormon”
for the first time since they left when Barack Obama was just starting his second presidential term.
“It was totally surreal being on that stage again, doing a show that I love so much, hearing an audience loving it too, and having people who clearly were seeing it for the first time,” says O’Malley after his return last week.
James likened the experience to going back to your hometown after decades away and someone asking you to grab something from the deli. “You’re like, ‘Oh, sure.’ And before you know it, you’re in the car and you’ve driven there,” she says. “It’s like those pathways are all still there.”
The pair will be in the show in their old roles until Jan. 17.
“The Book of Mormon,” about two Mormon missionaries who find more than they bargained for in Uganda, including gun-toting warlords and villages infected with HIV, was a cultural juggernaut when it opened on Broadway in 2011. After they left, new cast members kept it going and this year's 15th anniversary offered a way back.
They're doing the show “in a completely different world” than the last time, says James. “The discourse around race, around religion, around comedy, about responsibility of artists and representation — all of it was different.”
The musical earned James a Tony Award and she went on to marry and have a baby, enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe and earn another Tony nomination for “Suffs.” O’Malley earned a Tony nomination and also went on to marry and have a child, winning roles in “Hamilton” and “She Loves Me.”
She and O’Malley admit they were nervous coming back, even though each had performed it well over 800 times. They've had huge career moments since but “nothing that comes close to touching this,” she says. “We know for a fact that this doesn’t happen again. So we have to treat it like the precious gift that it is.”
James and O’Malley are part of a boomlet of original actors returning to their hit shows, like Aaron Tveit coming back to “Moulin Rouge” and Leslie Odom Jr. and Christopher Jackson jumping back into “Hamilton.”
“It’s something that I hope is done a lot more,” says O’Malley. “I hope that there are more shows that have the ability to be open long enough so that people can come back and revisit it.”
James and O’Malley have changed and the show they rejoin has also changed. During the pandemic shutdown, the creators — “South Park” masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez, co-creator of the equally irreverent musical “Avenue Q” — made minor changes to the script.
One notable tweak is giving James' character — the potential love interest Nabulungi, who sings the torch song “Sal Tlay Ka Siti” — more agency by becoming the one who scares off the warlords at the end.
That change now puts her on equal footing with the missionaries and means she gets to end the show center stage. “It’s a small little thing, but it makes a huge difference to me,” she says.
One of the show's highlights is O’Malley singing “Turn It Off,” a mock ode to keeping your homosexuality hidden. Raised Catholic, O’Malley has been out since he was 19 and co-founded the gay rights group Broadway Impact. “I love how far this show has let me explore my own faith journey,” he says.
The full cast of “The Book of Mormon” has stayed close with an active group text, and some from the original cast came to the theater to welcome back James and O’Malley.
“Everyone says that their theater family is like a family, and that is really true here,” says James. “We’ve been there for each other’s weddings, babies, deaths of family members, deaths of each other's parents.”
Backstage, the pair have found stickers and notes that have lasted for 15 years. There's a new tradition of putting headshots up in the stage-right dressing room tower, including one from the late Gavin Creel.
If James has her clogged sink, O’Malley rediscovered a specific smell under the stage: “I walked down there and I am immediately transported back to February of 2011 when we first moved into the theater.”
Although they rehearsed the show for two weeks to relearn everything, O’Malley hit a snag at the top of Act 2 on his first night back when he suddenly didn't know how to get on stage. He had to ask for help.
“I deleted that file a long time ago,” he says, laughing.
