Mormons on center stage

Which makes one wonder what Romney himself would think of the show. In public, he’s been good-humored. In private, would he fume?

Or would he realize that “The Book of Mormon,’’ blasphemy and all, is precisely the kind of public relations tool that Mormon candidates could use?

Mormonism looms over Romney’s presidential prospects, just as it did in 2008, except that instead of one major Mormon candidate, now there are two. For both Romney and Jon Huntsman, the path to the presidency is the same: appease evangelical Christians to win the GOP nomination, then assuage social liberals in a general election. (In a recent Gallup poll, notes Southern Methodist University political scientist Matthew Wilson, more Democrats than Republicans said they’d never vote for a Mormon.)

So far, Romney and Huntsman have taken very different approaches. In his speech on faith in 2008, Romney defended his devoutness, and argued that Mormons are no different from other Christians. Huntsman has played down his Mormonism, saying several faiths play roles in his life.

It’s a message the voters might or might not buy, since the nation’s fourth-largest religion has been more prominent of late. The church played a major role in supporting Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban. It has been having, as many have noted, a pop culture moment.

And when it comes to depictions of Mormon life, “The Book of Mormon’’ is, in some ways, the most accurate. HBO’s “Big Love’’ and TLC’s “Sister Wives’’ focus on polygamy, which the church has disavowed for a century. In “The Book of Mormon,’’ the subject doesn’t come up. Robert Lopez, who co-wrote the show, told me that there once was one polygamy joke. It didn’t get a laugh, so it was cut.

Yes, the show pokes fun of Mormon customs, goofing on the church’s reputation for repression and its ban on coffee and tea. (In a raucous dream sequence set in hell, Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer dance with a pair of giant coffee cups.) It paints young Mormons as repressed, in ways they spell out in a tap-dancing number called “Turn It Off.’’