By Claire Dietz
Before the curtain rises, the audience is greeted with a swell of music from the orchestra featuring the instrumentals of ABBA’s best-known hits. This is how Mamma Mia! begins.
Now, the hit musical will take the Hancher stage, promising audiences the time of their weekends. The performances will be at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Feb 26.
The show is based on the Swedish pop and dance group ABBA, which was active from 1972-82. The group is considered one of the most popular pop groups of all time.
Mamma Mia! is on its farewell tour; since its conception, it has been a musical people love and love to sing and dance to. Since its début in London’s West End on April 6, 1999, there have been 50 different iterations and tours around the world, from New Zeland to Las Vegas and seemingly everywhere in between.
The musical is based on the songs of ABBA, including the top hit “Mamma Mia”, and includes the group’s hit songs “Lay All Your Love on Me,” “Dancing Queen,” “Knowing Me,” “Take a Chance on Me,” “Thank You for the Music,” “Money, Money, Money,” “Voulez-Vous,” and “SOS.”
The musical was described by Variety in its initial review as mother-daughter drama “folded into some buoyant and kitschy Europop … The new ABBA show that may be the nearest thing the musical theater has got of late to a shotgun marriage.”
“Essentially,” it continued, “an excuse to get the audience on its feet for the sort of clap-happy finale that these days is de rigueur on either side of the Atlantic, Mamma Mia! achieves its decidedly modest aim with gusto.”
The musical centers on 20-year-old Sophie as she prepares to marry fiancé Sky. She hopes her father will walk her down the aisle; however, she has no idea who her father is. She consults her mother’s diary, detailing three whirlwind romances in the nine months before her birth. She invites the three men to her wedding in hopes of discovering her father’s identity.
Owen Gleiberman from “Entertainment Weekly” called it “Perhaps the single most ecstatic musical to open on Broadway since A Chorus Line. Mamma Mia! leaves you uplifted, enraptured, and feeling like a No. 1.”
In 2008, the musical was adapted into a movie featuring Meryl Streep as Donna Sheridan, Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, and Pierce Brosnan as Sam Carmichael. It initially received mixed reviews, an average rating of 5.5 out of 10 but grossed a worldwide box office total of $602 million.
One thing unique about the musical is the recognition it is a jukebox musical; in fact, it capitalizes on it. After the finale, the cast comes onstage and encourages the audience to sing along and dance to ABBA’s hit song “Dancing Queen” while some actors dance in the aisles.
The New York Times describes the actors encouraging an “audience singalong and group dance party during the choreographed curtain call — some performers even run into the aisles — the show ends on an intensive upbeat note.”