The Abba jukebox musical “Mamma Mia!” is back on Broadway, but don’t call it a revival. No, this is “a return engagement” of the initial New York staging, which closed 10 years ago. You might interpret that move as a reluctance by the show’s producers to spend financial and creative capital on a new version when they can bank on audiences eager to see the ur-feel good show in its original state.
Or you could see it as the closest we may ever come to a real-life time loop.
Whether it’s successive generations discovering, like clockwork, Abba’s music or the unsinkable “Mamma Mia!” itself, anything related to the Swedish quartet seems to reset every time the world appears ready to move on. Even the band’s name is a palindromic perfect circle with no end, or maybe no escape.
Similarly, the echo-y title of the musical is made up of just three letters forming an infinite hall of mirrors. An appropriate image, because since its world premiere in 1999 in London — where it has been playing since — “Mamma Mia!” has been an everlasting part of the pop-culture landscape.
From a wider angle, the show’s influence reverberates all over commercial theater, where it ushered in the modern era of jukebox musicals, which for the most part used to be revues organized around a genre, a scene or a musician — think “Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” or “Jelly’s Last Jam.” With “Mamma Mia!” came story-driven books, as well as an often close collaboration with the songs’ creators (a trend illustrated by the artistic and commercial successes of the Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” and “& Juliet,” featuring the music of the Swedish songwriter and producer Max Martin).
It feels as if at any given minute “Mamma Mia!” is playing somewhere in the world, on land or on sea. The immersive spinoff “Mamma Mia! The Party,” which is quite popular in Britain, has further reinforced the image of “Mamma Mia!” as a beloved escape hatch from any gray day. The 2008 film version was the highest-grossing adaptation of a Broadway musical until Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” came along, and even the misfire of a sequel, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” (2018), did not inflict a mortal wound to the brand.
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The post ‘Mamma Mia!’ Is Back on Broadway. But Did It Ever Really Leave Us? appeared first on New York Times.
