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Mamma Mia! is the theatrical equivalent of an armchair journey to an island with a bluer-than-blue sky and a fuller-than-full moon — a mythical land where young lovers live happily ever after and older lovers get a second chance.
The show features 22 hits by the Swedish pop quartet ABBA. As you might know, the show has been an enormous hit everywhere, from London to Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Australia. It opened in New York to a $27-millon advance ticket sale.
The show is exuberant and good-natured, with lots of sparkle and a winning cast. Book writer Catherine Johnson custom-tailored a script to transform a golden-oldies concert into a stage musical.
She did have some help. Set on a Greek island, her plot for this show loosely combines the stories of the Italian movie Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell and the British play Shirley Valentine.
Still, the show has a bright and cheery atmosphere, and enough characters and scenes to accommodate the diverse songs. The musical numbers are listed in alphabetical order in the Playbill so as not to spoil the surprise of where they’re inserted.
I have never been clear about the significance of ABBA, other than that the band’s moniker is an acronym of its members’ first names (Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn and Anni-Frid). Back in its heyday of the late 1970s, ABBA seemed weirdly sweet in its spandex outfits and blow-dried coifs.
The group’s eclectic style ranged all over the pop atlas from straight-ahead rock to Euro-ballad to disco. Here was a Swedish band that made millions, not with the outlaw swagger of the northern latitudes, but the bouncy melodies associated with Latin romance. Theirs was the music of blond Europe on Mediterranean holiday, the soundtrack to an endless vacation commercial.
The basic story revolves around 20-year-old Sophie Sheridan (Chilina Kennedy), who is about to marry in a white-wedding ceremony at the tourist hotel/tavern run by her mother, Donna (Dee Hoty).
In her day, Mom was a gypsy-spirited rocker who fronted a trio called Donna and the Dynamos — and who gave birth to Sophie out of wedlock. Having discovered Donna’s diary for the year 1979, Sophie learns that she was sired by one of three men who dallied on the island with her mom during one fateful summer.
Armed with this knowledge, Sophie sets out to learn the true identity of her father by inviting all three to the wedding, setting in motion a series of awkward confrontations and opportunities for inane costume parades.
The evening’s basic format has two characters talking until one breaks into the first line of an ABBA hit, and we laugh or grimace, according to how seamless or preposterous the segue appears. Soon, the story becomes almost irrelevant, a faint narrative pulse we occasionally monitor as Sophie struggles to pick one of her mother’s former lovers to give her away at the altar.
The songs are the true stars of the show, outshining anyone in the cast. That said, most of the performers are in good form. Hoty looks good and after two years of touring this show, she has nicely grown into the role of Donna. Her vocals are good and her character now rises above the others. As the backup ladies of Donna and the Dynamos, Cynthia Sophiea and Rosalyn Kerins do credible work, seizing all their comic and vocal opportunities.
There are some notable improvements to this production. The sound has been toned down to an enjoyable level and the stark white lighting now has some color. Even the tacky gold-lam� costumes for Donna and the Dynamos have been replaced.
The marvel is that the show format works, considering the creators took 22 hit songs that were written as dance numbers and shoehorned them, 20 years later, into a goofy plot. And I would wager that more money was spent on the lighting superstructure that arrives on stage for the curtain call than on the rest of the set put together.
Mamma Mia!‘s dazzle lies not in its literary complexities, but in the pure showmanship of its presentation. British director Phyllida Lloyd, who has been with the production since its London premiere, wisely lets the songs do the talking. She keeps her actors as colorful ornaments, spun around and around by choreographer Anthony Van Laast, who seems to recognize the fact that long before MTV, ABBA was a rock video waiting to happen.
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Mamma Mia!
Through July 19
Forrest Theatre
1114 Walnut St.
Tickets: $25-$75
800-447-7400
www.telecharge.com
