LONDON -- Think British theater, and you conjure up Shakespeare, Shaw and Olivier.
But this year, a new name has been added to the list: Abba.
The music, lyrics and 1970s fashion sense of the Swedish quartet is back in vogue, launching "Mamma Mia!" London's hottest musical hit in years.
You have to beg friends or deal with scalpers to get a ticket for a show that is sold out until April 2000. Seeking a seat on a Friday or Saturday night? Wait until July.
This is no tribute show. It's a mother-daughter soap opera -- with a wedding -- set on a Greek isle. Abba's melodies, spirit and, yes, fondness for platform shoes and Lycra outfits infuse the 22-song musical that often ends with 1,650 spectators dancing through the encore and belting out the lyrics to "Dancing Queen."
The song list reads like a compilation album, from "Chiquitita" to "Winner Takes It All," with the numbers listed alphabetically in the program to ensure that the audience doesn't turn the show into London's first karaoke musical.
But this is not the end of British culture as we know it. The country always had a soft spot for the soaring melodies of Abba, two married couples who launched to international fame in the southern England seaside town of Brighton by winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with a rendition of "Waterloo," in Swedish and English. The marriages ended before the band called it quits in the early 1980s.
For the last few years, Britain has been awash in Abba conventions, tribute shows and greatest-hits records, with assorted boy and girl bands covering some of the group's top singles. Now, theater audiences are lapping up a fun, romantic evening of entertainment that has charmed critics and drawn interest from Hollywood producers.
And, get ready America, "Mamma Mia!" is bound to cross the Atlantic.
You may not think you know their songs, yet if you were around in the 1970s or '80s, or have taken an elevator ride since, there's an Abba hook imbedded in the brain.
"Even between consenting adults, there are certain predilections to which one does not lightly confess," Alastair Macaulay of the Financial Times wrote after the show's April opening. "In my case, a fondness for Shirley Temple's movies is one such. Now it is joined -- herewith vanishes my social life -- by the fact that I actually enjoyed `Mamma Mia!' "
He wasn't alone.
Georgina Brown of the Mail on Sunday wrote "... it's Abba's evening and it's irresistible."
Associated Press journalist Matt Wolf labeled the show as "quite simply a phenomenon."
The guiding light of this phenomenon is producer Judy Craymer, 42, who had the notion that a musical based on Abba songs would sell to the masses.
"I was always knocked out by the songs," Craymer says. "There's something so theatrical. The songs are not abstract. They have accessible lyrics about relationships, boy-girl, husband-wife."
Craymer holds court in a temporary office near the Prince Edward Theater. To make a point, she often quotes Abba lyrics. That may be a bit disconcerting, until you realize that the songs and show have been very good to Craymer.
She says the show has already taken in $24 million in ticket sales, has an advance of $11 million and needed only 27 weeks to recoup the initial $5 million investment.
In the precarious world of musical theater, "Mamma Mia!" is that rarest of commodities -- a hit that may never close.
All this, for a back-to-basics musical with a feminist bent.
"The '80s and '90s were filled with spectaculars, amazing helicopters [`Miss Saigon'], chandeliers crashing [`Phantom of the Opera'] or people storming barricades [`Les Miserables']," Craymer says. "This show goes with the times. Minimalist. Simple. Effective."
Forty-something Donna, played by Siobhan McCarthy, has a daughter to marry off, and the bride-to-be, Sophie, played by Lisa Stokke, has a yearning to find her biological father. Thumbing through her mom's youthful diary, the daughter finds three likely candidates and invites them to the island.
And off they go, accompanied by the songs of Abba.
Agnetha Faltskog, Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid Lyngstad -- their first initials formed the group's name -- created pure pop confections and sold 350 million records in their heyday. Rock fans may have turned up their noses, but Abba struck a chord with kids and their parents in the disco-laden 1970s.
After Abba broke up, the song-writing partnership of Andersson and Ulvaeus continued. They collaborated with lyricist Tim Rice on "Chess," which played in London for three years. In 1995, they launched the musical "Kristina" in their native Sweden. It was Craymer who convinced the duo that buried in the Abba catalog was the stuff of a musical. Then, all she had to do was get a plot, production team, theater, cast, seed money -- well, the list goes on.
The key seems to have come in January 1997 when Craymer landed writer Catherine Johnson. In the program, Johnson writes of the challenge, "... this is a bigger conundrum than any Sherlock Holmes had to solve -- how do you take 30 of the best known songs in the world and tell a story?"
More than two years later, the answer is now on stage, crafted by a crack team that includes opera and theatrical director Phyllida Lloyd, choreographer Anthony Van Laast and production designer Mark Thompson.
But Craymer isn't done. She's ready to take the show global, launching in Toronto in May 2000. There are plans for a U.S. tour that Craymer says could pass through the Baltimore-Washington area. She anticipates a Broadway opening in late 2001. An opening in Australia -- real Abba territory -- is due in May 2001. "It's going to be madness," she says.
Pub Date: 12/20/99
