I Believe

The number opens with all the earnest bluster of someone who has been told his whole life that certainty is a virtue. The piano and brass support a young missionary with the confidence of someone who has never had a serious reason to doubt, and that confidence is musically illustrated through a structure that keeps building, keeps adding instruments and intensity, as if the song itself believes its own argument. Andrew Rannells brings a voice that is simultaneously technically brilliant and deliberately naive — there is real power in the delivery, and that power is the joke and the tragedy at once. The song is about the armor that belief provides, and also about its fragility: the harder Elder Price sings that he believes, the more we sense he is convincing himself. Parker and Stone write in the tradition of satirical musical theater but with a modern knowing wink — the target is not faith itself but the particular American flavor of unearned certainty. Culturally, it landed at a moment when Broadway audiences were hungry for something that could be both spectacularly produced and genuinely subversive. This is the song you play when you want to understand how optimism can be simultaneously admirable and absurd.