When a hit Broadway show reaches the ten-year mark it’s cause for celebration. For Mamma Mia! the milestone was marked with a special lighting ceremony at the Empire State Building, a proclamation from the Mayor of New York City, and a gala charity performance which was followed by an encore presentation of the show’s finale — complete with laser lights and fireworks — on the street outside the Winter Garden Theatre. “The energy was electrifying,” recalls Lisa Brescia, who is currently playing the lead role of Donna in the show. “We feel the energy every night,” she explains, “but on that night it was just over the top.”
Mamma Mia!, now a world-wide musical phenomenon and also the tenth longest running show in Broadway history, is the brainchild of Judy Craymer, who had the idea for a show created from hit songs by ABBA over twenty years ago. At the time, the world-famous Swedish pop group had already disbanded and Craymer, although she had worked in theater, film and television, had never created a musical from scratch before. But as she sat in her London apartment listening to tapes of ABBA songs (this was before the CD era) she became convinced: “My inspiration was the song ‘The Winner Takes It All,’” Craymer reports. “It had a big story to tell. In fact,” she adds, “all their songs range from soap opera to high drama.” ABBA songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus gave Craymer their blessing for the musical project on condition that the songs were integrated into a good story and the show not become a tribute compilation or an ABBA biography.
But the story related in “The Winner Takes It All,” is about a couple’s break-up, notes Craymer. “My challenge was, how can you make an original story about divorce and unhappiness? And the answer is you can’t,” she says. Instead, she asked Catherine Johnson, a British playwright and television writer, to come up with a plot that had as its ingredients, holidays, weddings and romance. “ABBA is like a confection,” Craymer explains, “you couldn’t make this into a Greek tragedy.” A tragedy no, but Greek, yes. Johnson devised a frothy tale set on a sunny Greek island, in which Sophie, a young 20-year old who’s been raised by her single mom, Donna, attempts to discover the identity of her father by inviting three possible candidates to her wedding. Meanwhile, Donna’s two best women friends, who are also on hand to celebrate the wedding, relive their carefree days when they once performed in all-girl band. With generous helpings from the trove of ABBA gold, and direction by Phyllida Lloyd — who went on to direct Meryl Streep in the movie version of the musical, as well as the current Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady — Mamma Mia! proved an irresistible draw.
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Now, a decade after its Broadway debut, the winning formula still, obviously, works. “People all around the world know these songs,” says Brescia, the 10th anniversary Donna. “The music is cross-generational. We have six-year-olds in the audience who have memorized the movie,” she reports. “They know every single word and they want to sing along. And sometimes they do! And the baby-boomers and beyond, they remember when ABBA first came out. I remember my father introducing me to the songs when I was about ten,” Brescia recalls.
“Audience members frequently tell me that they’ve come to the show because they know they are going to have fun and they leave feeling uplifted,” Brescia continues. “They come back again and again because they know they will have a great time. And they really care about the story,” she adds. “The show centers on Donna, but also centers on her daughter, this young woman who is searching for her identity and a future with the young man that she loves. I think the young people really identify with her. They also dig looking at the beautiful young dancers that we have in the show. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that!” Brescia says she always asks the fans lined up outside the stage door every night where they’ve come from. “You name a country and that’s where they are from. The show’s appeal seems pretty universal, no matter where you are from or how old you are.”
To raise the fun quotient of the evening the Mamma Mia! creative team chose to list the show’s songs in the program alphabetically rather than in the traditional scene order. As a result the well-known hits like “Dancing Queen,” “S.O.S.,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You” — and, of course, “The Winner Takes It All” — sneak-up on the audience through the show. From the very first preview performance in London twelve years ago, the show’s curtain call was greeted with a tidal wave of enthusiasm from the audience. It’s still a common occurrence for some of the audience to end up literally dancing in the aisles during the three-song encore. “The endorphins that are released at the end of the show in the final mega-mix are just incredible,” says Brescia. “I think Mamma Mia! is the happiest place that I have ever worked.”
Gerard Raymond writes on theater and the arts and lives in New York City.
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