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'Mamma Mia' a Guilty Pleasure

Linda Winer | Critical Mass

October 18, 2001

From left, Karen Mason, Louise Pitre, Judy Kaye in "Mamma Mia!", the musical based on songs by the pop group Abba, which opens on Broadway Thursday night. (Newsday/Ari Mintz)

In our imaginary encyclopedia of pop-culture shamelessness, the guilty pleasure section has a boisterous, unapologetic new entry.

Mamma Mia!, the London smash that opened last night at the tastefully refurbished (i.e., post-Cats) Winter Garden Theatre, is ABBAs grandiose yet modest, dopey but disarmingly sweet glob of neo-nostalgic brain candy.

If, indeed, our battered national psyche is in need of a few painless, mindless hours of improbable romantic comedy with disco-friendly resonance, the show already a hit in Toronto, Chicago and L.A. should bring the infectious 70s Swedish pop group the bone-deep popularity it enjoyed in every country but this one.

If memory serves, the creative team has tricked up some of the human-sized allure of the London production for Broadway and leaned more aggressively on the coarse side of goofiness. Thus, though the show is less of an innocent hoot than the original, it remains what producers like to call a feel-good show.

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We would have also liked a few more feel-smart moments, but the unassuming simplicity is a likable antidote to the overproduced, scenery-crashing mega-musicals that, until recently, ran the international market like a machine.

Nor is this some old revue of ABBA Gold in prefab theatrical clothing. Instead, composers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus the male half of the defunct ABBA quartet collaborated with playwright Catherine Johnson on a genuine, old-fashioned book musical into which they plug or amusingly shoehorn their hits. The story is purposefully cross-generational and, not incidentally, a swell show for mothers and daughters too.

We are on a Greek island designed by Mark Thompson as a sky-blue, ocean-blue sitcom fantasy with pieces of taverna on turntables. Every so often, one of the Winter Gardens high-tech hydraulic lifts will elevate some action or another, just because the theater can. But, mainly, the activities are as humanly domestic as an exotic locale will allow.

It is the day before the wedding of Sophie, the 20-year-old daughter of Donna, an unrepentant former wild child and single mother portrayed with stellar nonchalance and certain-age womanhood by Broadway newcomer Louise Pitre. You see, Sophie read in Donnas diary about the three men who might have been her father and, in an effort to find her identity, she invites all three to her party. She could have had them take DNA tests, sure, but you try making that story sing.

Before we continue on this gripping mystery, let us pause a moment to admire Pitre. A French Canadian (the name is pronounced Pee-trah), she is the sort of stage creature who knows exactly how to make small gestures important and honest emotions big. With her white-silver hair and a tough-cookie glam that suggests choreographer Twyla Tharp, Pitre may do at least as much for the image of middle-aged women as she does for the marketability of ABBA.

She and Tina Maddigan, who plays a lustily wholesome Sophie, are among the few holdovers from the acclaimed Toronto production. Each character is assigned two female friends. Sophies fiance played with less than overwhelming chemistry by Joe Machota is also assigned two male friends. Add three visiting potential fathers, and it seems fair to wonder how all this triadic symmetry ends up so square.

We also must wonder about the casting of the younger generation, which tends toward the obnoxious and the oddly muscle-bound. Donna, part of a rock trio in her youth, fares better with her buddies the comically statuesque Karen Mason and the earthy Judy Kaye. Here, too, the characters are pushed to be caricatures, but the talented women are also good friends. Dean Nolen, Ken Marks and the pleasantly formidable David W. Keeley are comparably well-cast as Donnas former flings.

Lloyd, best known as a serious opera and theater director, has lost some of the charm in her Broadway production and Anthony Van Laasts choreography pushes the bumps and grinds more than we recall. But the show remains an entertaining escape that crosses Bye Bye Birdie with Grease. Nobody takes the show too seriously.

Most important, everyone respects the music, the catchy bubblegum tunes and pleasantly regular backbeat rhythms of Dancing Queen, Winner Takes It All, Take a Chance on Me and others with less of a place in the American pop bloodstream. In London, surrounded by international ABBA fans, we felt as if we were in a country where everyone else is on the metric system. You know, we could do the calculations, but they werent automatic.

At Tuesdays preview in New York, there was less of an immediate charge every time the stylishly directed pop orchestra played a few opening bars of this or that song. But Ulvaeusok has called this the musical we never knew we had written. If the advance sale and track record are any indication, New York will know now, too.