I have a theory about the music from ABBA (It’s just my experience, but maybe it’s yours too). Their songs, composed and produced by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and sang by Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, are so advantageous beautiful, so eye-catching and timeless and addictive, so sublime in their mix of joy and heart cut that your whole favorite Abba will always be … It is always to listen.
“Mother!“The indelibly exuberant Jukebox music that is revived on Broadway for a six-month limited commitment (it opens tonight at Winter Garden Theater, where the original Broadway production opened in 2001 and ran for 14 years), is a show based on the fact that every Abba-song is its own perfect epiphane of ecstasy. Over the past 25 years, and will now continue to do so, to hear these songs can make one feel like the music fan’s equivalent to a happy coke lake that makes lines.
Each Jukebox musical is by definition to serve the music at the center. But no Jukebox musical has ever worked on quite the smart-abdiste way to “Mamma Mia!” do. As everyone knows (after 50 international productions, plus 2008 Meryl Streep movie version and its sequel 2018; a third film is in the works), is the action of “Mamma Mia!” is a piece of high-tapped silliness that suggests Shakespeare in its amorous comedy mode trying to remove a romantic version of “Gilligan’s Island.” The attitude is a sunny Greek island, and the central character, Donna, is an independent single mother who owns and runs a tavern there. Her 20-year-old daughter, Sophie, is about to get married. But who is Sophie’s father?
After going through his mother’s diary, Sophie realizes that it could have been one of Donna’s three freer from Europe’s distant world in 1979 (which is when and where she became pregnant). So Sophie invites all three to the wedding. Before she gets hoisted, she wants to find out who her dad is … and who she is.
“Mom Mia!” is kind of a romantic comedy, but more than it is If Romance: Its place in the world and how switching from generation to generation. (It has changed a pulp Then “Mamma Mia!” First opened.) But part of the musical’s jokingly is that its plot, in almost every detail, is like a machine that has been reverse designed to serve as a delivery system for 22 ABBA songs. Make no mistake: The story works (in the end it is quite touching). But it also feels like something that may have been designed by an AI program that liked ABBA. The show invites us practically to laugh at the nicely convened way that a song like “Honey, Honey” or “Knowing Me, Knowing You” will disappoint with it (thin) motivation to sing it. And that’s why Dithery Sweet Mindlessness by “Mamma Mia!” is part of his magic. The show acts as a friendly frame for the songs without threatening to get in the way of them.
I saw the original stage version three times, and while it revived “Mamma Mia!” Have his own spirit (which I would call a little more bumptious, with more aggressive choreography), it really is the same show. It is directed, like the original (and as the movie version 2008), by Phyllida Lloyd, and it remains carefully faithful what she did the first time.
As I: It has the same blocky rotating two -part set that looks like the walls of a tavern that is whitewashed by Ikea. The same boring opening and closing, built around the haunting stems of “I have a dream.” The same show-stopping, we go to-the-Middle-aging-freak-flag-fly scenes with Donna (Christine Sherrill) and her two old comrades, Rosie (Carly Sakolove) and Tanya (Jalynn Steele), the previous back-up songs by Donna and Dynamos. Same Sung-In-A-Hair-Dryer version of “Dancing Queen”, the same shock comedy line of snorkelers in Flippor under “Lay all your love on me,” the same giggle-out-houd moment when one of Dynamos launches in the opening of “Chiquitita” to penetrate its friend, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you to penetrate its friend. (The real motivation is: Here’s the song! Party on it!)
It also has the same Daffy Affectionate High-Camp Acting of the three potential fathers: Sam (Victor Wallace), the architect who designed Taverna; Bill (Jim Newman), Corny Globe-Trav author; And Harry (Rob Marnell), Token Brit who was once a “main banner” and now the soul is in the middle class. And it has the same show-stopping dramatic highlight: Donna’s reproduction of “The Winner Takes It All” more powerful than Abba’s version.
If there is a difference between how “Mamma Mia!” Felt when it first opened and how it feels today, this is: The show is now a double layer cake of nostalgia. Already in 2001, it dropped into our pent-up nostalgia river for ABBA-so as the revelation, late in coming for so many listeners, that ABBA was as large a pop group as the largest pop groups ever. In all other cases we knew it at that time. We knew the Beatles were good when they happened; Same for the stones or bee gears or stelely dan or zeppelin or madonna. We knew that punk was a Barb-wire gaming exchange.
But in the 1970s, when Abba had become the most successful pop group since the Beatles, no one dared to mention them in the same breath as … The Beatles. And to suggest that they should be would have come off as blasphemy. (For many it would still do it.) ABBA was Swedish, they dressed on stage as Glam Disco Astronauts, and they were considered talented suppliers of infectious caste bubble-gum-pop. That what their songs added was a full -scale vision of in and out of love and loss and romance and pain and desire and fulfillment, told entirely from a woman’s point of view, is part of the reason why their genius was not fully recognized and respected.
Everything that changed in the 90s. The culture captured ABBA, stripped the label “Guilty Pleasure” away from pop masterpieces such as “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me” and “Super Trours” and “Money, Money, Money.” The culmination of that evolution was “Mamma Mia!”, A show that was and remains, a two and a half hour pop-rhapsody of joy.
What is different, after 25 years of all the newly combed ABBA love, is that our boring nostalgia is not just for ABBA. It’s also for “Mamma Mia!” himself, which now plays as a period of time from another world. The show, when it premiered, was set 21 years after 1979 (in other words: Today’s), and its theme was expressed in the counterpoint between Donna, the 70’s feminist who had gone his own way, to have a child on his own and start his own business in the foreign country (Grants, and Sophie, who made a strand, to the rebuke of the … Rebellion against his mother’s independent of … Removes to marry, to become one, to a neighbor, and Sophie, who revolted against her mother’s independence with … Removes to get married, to become a beach, to neighbor, and Sophie, who rebelled his mother’s independence of … to get married, to become a beach, to the neighbor, and Sophie, who made an insertor, who made an insertion invaus, delimitation). In its way, this sweet reversal expressed somewhat: the old -fashioned romance made a comeback. That is why we also had a stream of Rom-Coms.
But Rom-Com, if you had not noticed, have made a slow bleach. It is not gone, but it depends on its lacquered nails, and it binds to the way our reigning pop music women, from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé to Olivia Rodrigo to Billie Eilish, now often sings with love with bitter skepticism. ABBA’s votes sometimes looked at men with anxiety and doubt (just think of the unhappy vibe of “money, money, money”) but mostly with longing. And now it does “Mamma Mia!” A piece of cooked romantic optimism which is in a certain way a bit in line with the times. More than ever, the show seems to challenge the world to meet the sincerity of its passion.
There are countless moments in the new version that I loved: The trolling ominous momentum built around “Gimme! Gimme!,” Which Sophie’s three dads offer each one to give her away at the wedding; The stage-stalking courty Jalynn Steele “knows your mother” into a funny slapstick tour; Rob Marnell’s complaining reproduction of the wonderful-in-line-be-a-abba-classic “Our last summer”; The transporting mix of Christine Sherrill and Victor Walce’s votes on “SOS”; And the ecstatic grand finale, which gives us the entire circle to the arena-rock dreams in the 70s.
There are also some glitchy elements. The orchestra, which faithfully recreates Abba’s arrangement, can be a bit high, sometimes overpower vocal performances, especially Amy Weaver. (Maybe she just needs to bent a little more.) The whole production feels More forces than the original, and I’m not sure it needed to be. Yet “Mamma Mia!” remains what it always was: a party for your entertainment centers. It’s a show that almost invites us to roll our eyes on it – until that moment or two later when we inevitably go, My, my, how can I resist you?