Can ‘Mamma Mia!’ Save Us From This Dreadful Summer?

Will nostalgia and devotion translate to ringing cash tills?

The return of Mamma Mia! to Broadway, “for a limited six-month engagement,” is bargaining on ABBA fans’ eternal desire to hear their favorite songs again (and again). Judging by the man tapping his feet behind me, the many hands waving in the air, and the whooping that accompanied the show’s better-executed set pieces, its producers and the Winter Garden Theatre could be right in calculating on one of theater’s surer bets.

The show, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, certainly has a formidable financial act to follow. The last resident of the Winter Garden was George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, which broke multiple records—becoming the first play to surpass $4 million in ticket sales in a single week, as well as becoming the highest-grossing play in Broadway history.

So far Mamma Mia! has proved similarly all-conquering. The show, with its laughably flimsy plot, premiered in London in 1999 and New York in 2001 (beginning life at the Winter Garden), where it enjoyed a 14-year run and 5,773 performances. It never stopped running in the U.K. Its resolutely lo-fi presentation contrasts sharply with ABBA Voyage—the concert rendering the band-as-avatars in a feast of digital trickery and technical mastery playing in a specially constructed space in London.

With music and lyrics by ABBA’s Benny Andersson & Björn Ulvaeus, a book by Catherine Johnson, and choreography by Anthony Van Laast, Mamma Mia! is Broadway’s ninth-longest running show of all time, and has spawned two joy-drenched musical movies, starring Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, and Amanda Seyfried (and Cher!) all executing collectively convincing impressions of having the wacked-out times of their lives.

Many in the audience are likely in attendance because of those movies, alongside those who loved the stage show the first time around, and those for whom who still treasure ABBA’s music and the exquisite compendium that is ABBA Gold.

This history of pleasure is what Mamma Mia! aspires to mine, and yet—in this production—flails in the attempt. Done exuberantly right, Mamma Mia! should feel like soaring karaoke meets wild revels, a whole lot of song-and-dance unreality stuffed into a real-world setting. Yet the tone—come join the raucous party, bring your shiniest bellbottoms!—feels tinnier in this awkwardly mounted, haphazard jukebox show, hampered by poor sound and lackluster staging.

Against a drab backdrop of white-washed walls, a young woman, Sophie (Amy Weaver), is about to get married to true love Sky (Grant Reynolds) on the Greek island where she and her hippy-dippy mother Donna (Christine Sherrill), have lived all their lives. Sophie invites the men she suspects of being her father—British, solid Harry (Rob Marnell), wild man Bill (Jim Newman), and easy-going American Sam (Victor Wallace)—to come to the wedding to give her away and find out which one is actually her father.

Donna’s emotional freefall around the presence of the trio is accompanied by her reuniting with old friends Tanya (Jalynn Steele) and Rosie (Carly Sakolove) to re-form the band they once sang in. The best moments of the musical—on stage and screen—feature the older female friends singing, joking, hanging out, and remembering. In a youth-obsessed pop culture, Mamma Mia! proudly emphasizes that having fun, being loud, dressing up, acting outrageously, taking chances, and embracing desire are the provinces of those growing older too.

Sherrill nails her 11 ‘o’ clock “Winner Takes It All,” even if the arrangement feels oddly paced, and Steele and Sakolove play their characters with the right kind of broad-comic energy (Steele’s “Does Your Mother Know That You’re Out?” and Sakolove’s “Take a Chance on Me,” alongside Newman, are delightfully staged).

However, over two-and-a-half hours, the show’s plot barely progresses, and is merely a rail on which to hang the Swedish supergroup’s greatest hits, all sung well (like “Voulez-Vous,” “Dancing Queen,” “The Winner Takes It All,” and “Super Trouper”). The characters sing these songs—that kind of go along with where the story is at—at each other in place of words. Sometimes the joins are smooth, quite often the song feels hammered clumsily into place.

Only sporadically does this production of Mamma Mia! flare into the kind of life that its wonderful songlist merits. Bar a few numbers and its get-up-and-dance finale, the show almost does ABBA down.

The pounding sound levels of the orchestra dominate and occasionally drown out the singing. Some arrangements bizarrely cut off the ends of songs and jerkily shove us back into the action, when the instinct of the audience is to applaud. A few characters look hopelessly frozen as they are sung at.

The show retains an eccentric charm—the dancing company and their flippers in “Lay All Your Love On Me” remain a moment of welcome silliness—but for significant stretches it also feels stilted and flat.

In 2001, opening in the wake of 9/11, Mamma Mia! found a vital role as a route or conduit for escapism. At its best it is wacky and nostalgic, heartfelt and ridiculous. 24 years later, in a world riven with different kinds of tension and alarm, it could perform the same function. But this Mamma Mia! doesn’t feel as fun and untethered as it should.

Finally, after a muted final scene featuring theater’s most gigantic, scary moon, the show provides an opportunity for the audience to sing, whoop, and clap along to “Dancing Queen,” “Mamma Mia!,” and “Waterloo,” as the lead characters resplendently decked out in seventies-glam costumes give a mini-concert. Suddenly, Mamma Mia! becomes the delirious singalong and dance party it has wanted to be all along. In this production, it feels both welcome and far too late.

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