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If you miss the touring version of Mamma Mia! that opened last night for a one-week run at Starlight Theatre, you can always track it down in Germany, Amsterdam, Switzerland or Spain; from Newcastle to Taipei, the bubbly musical taken from those ingratiating Abba songs precludes language and geographical barriers. No nation is too big or too foreign to avoid the jingle-jangle Abba-esque revolution.

Mamma Mia! of course is only a thread of a musical; Stephen Sondheim it ain't. Abba, as every Jonas Bros. fan will know, was the Swedish pop group whose ten-year career from 1972-1982 proffered frothy single after single such as "Dancing Queen" and "SOS." The composing team of Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, a chipmunky version of Lennon-McCartney, looked to disco and Motown, Dusty Springfield and girl groups. When they devised the musical, which premièred in London on March 23, 1999, it was not intended to be an über-rock spectacle like The Who's Tommy. The storyline, almost an afterthought as a framework for the songs, was a wisp of a fairy tale; yet, as reported on the musical's website, as of August 19, Mamma Mia! has surpassed Fiddler on the Roof to become the 13th longest-running Broadway musical. Take that, all you Rodgers and Hartses.

The musical, like last year's movie adaptation with Meryl Streep and the inept vocal stylings of Pierce Brosnan, takes place on a Greek isle where young Sophie Sheridan (Liana Hunt, in her national tour début) is to be married to her love, Sky (Adam Jacobs). Oh, there is one complication: because she does not know the identity of her father, she secretly invites the three men with whom her mother Donna (performed by Rachel Tyler this evening) once had three romances--respectively, with Bill Austin (Martin Kildare), an Australian travel writer; Sam Carmichael (John Hemphill), an architect; and Harry "Headbanger" Bright (Michael Aaron Linder), once a rock musician and now an over-40 financier. These three men and a baby-turned-woman must relive and attempt to renew their pasts together, if they had one. Donna is both the obstacle--she does and does not wish to see any of the three guys again--and also the musical's focus: does she know who the father is? Mamma Mia! is a musical The Dating Game.

Starlight's touring production directed by Phyllida Lloyd (who also directed the movie) finds the magic somehow in the meager musical; her job is to make the songs drilled into one's brain somehow sound new, and appropriate in the play's context. The book by Catherine Johnson is both more and less than her similar screenplay. It darts along more efficiently and knits together the songs more intelligently. And it is far less tied to the movie's movie stars. Monkey business developed for the three guys while they are singing shapes their characters: knowing that the plus-sized Harry was once a manic punk gives the actor something real to play off. (Indeed, Kildare, Hemphill, and Linder are the best things in the show: they create their own show.)

Yes, much of the humor is of the older-woman-seeking-herself variety, with mild double entendres and hints of what-not (which is why the one bit of casting in the movie version, of Julie Walters as one of Donna's oldest friends, made perfect sense: with its middle-age optimistic pessimism it was a Julie Walters movie, like so many she has starred in). Yet to the large audience that stayed through an off-and-on rain for two-plus hours there were evidently few discordant notes in the passing nods to feminism and finding oneself in the storyline. It was erased in the film version, and it hardly registers here, either. No matter: the audience came for the songs and they got them.

As the 22 tunes reel off, it gives one a chance to reflect on the popularity of such shows: non-musicals, in a sense. More people have seen Mamma Mia! than all of Sondheim's musicals throughout his entire career, to consider a Broadway musical virtuoso whose songs are fundamentally the shows. The story has few surprises, so it must be the music; yet the notion that other songs could be sorted and used never strays far from the mind. Unlike other rock and pop musicals--Hair, Billy Elliot, Cats--this one feels produced, rather than organic. The Elton John songs for Billy Elliot are nothing special nor especially hummable. They do their job, though, in cueing the characters for the audience. Here, at least by occasionally interrupting songs with some dialogue, the sense that the songs are part of something greater is easier to imagine. At such moments, the idea of theater is not so faraway. And then who can really prepare the guillotine for a show when all around audience members (including an older man off to my right) are singing along in the rain? Only an ogre, one supposes, but that is another musical.

REVIEW
Starlight Theatre
Mamma Mia!
Running September 8-13 (reviewed September 8)
4600 Swope Park Road, KCMO
For tickets (816) 363-7827 or online at www.kcstarlight.com

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups. 

Comments(1):

1. Mamma Mia!

   I love Mamma Mia! I also love your review.

   Thursday, September 10, 2009 Jon M