On Sunday, the Observer did another of their “stitch up” jobs: a couple of years ago we had Lynn Barber, a brilliant interviewer but an avowed theatre despiser, despatched to confirm her prejudice, and now, finally noticing how jukebox musicals are all the rage, the Review section editor has regular contributor Barbara Ellen on a mission to collect a few.
One’s heckles are immediately raised about her credentials and accuracy, however, when she tell, in her fourth paragraph, “what no one could deny is that these hybrids of pop nostalgia and theatrical are here to stay” and states in support, “Tonight’s the Night, a Ben Elton show based on the hits of Rod Stewart, is playing in the West End….” and also goes on to adduce in further evidence that “this summer, London’s Dominion Theatre will host a version of the album Thriller by Michael Jackson, an artist in dire need of public rehabilitation”. Tonight’s the Night in fact closed in October 2004; as for Thriller, it is being staged for one day only!
She goes to Mamma Mia! and is surprised that the audience isn’t dressed for the part. “It was a disappointment to arrive at Mamma Mia! and discover the audience weren’t all dressed as their favourite Abba members. Inexperienced in these matters, I had been picturing some kind of Swedish Rocky Horror Show, where everyone camped it up and sang along to the songs”. Sorry, Barbara, the show wasn’t written to your expectations. And when she then goes on to complain, “Far from the expected explosion of camp, Seventies silliness, Mamma Mia! turns out, rather disappointingly, to be a drab musical sit-com set in Greece…” She only finally gets what she thought she’d come from in the encores of Waterloo and Dancing Queen, “but by then, I’d rather lost the will to camp”, and states, “surely one could be forgiven for expecting a modicum of Abba-ness in an Abba musical?”
Once again she gets it heroically wrong. Mamma Mia! – which is now the Rolls Royce of jukebox musicals, not The Rocky Horror Show of them – can be blamed for many things, not least spawning such lame, pale imitators as We Will Rock You and Tonight’s the Night, but the point about these shows is to create something new out of an old, familiar pop repertoire, not merely replicate it. She’s getting herself confused with tribute shows.
She concludes, via stops in Birmingham for the UB40 musical Promises and Lies – which prompts what she calls a “mini-breakdown” that reduced her to a “pitiful wreck: huddled dead-eyed in my seat…. with my coat thrown over me, hugging my bag and all but sucking my thumb for comfort” and at We Will Rock You and Movin’ Out, that after seeing “all four shows, I still feel none the wiser about the validity, or otherwise, of the genre, though there’s no betting I’ll be rushing back for more any time soon.” So the exercise has been more or less entirely pointless and a waste of her time (and ours, to read it) as well as paper. She has a final sneer: “I would rather be hung from a gibbet in Stockholm than sit through Mamma Mia! again”.
As it happens, I went to see Mamma Mia! again myself last night, for at least the 12th time that I can remember! (It was my sixth time in London, and I’ve also seen it three times in New York and once each in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Stockholm!) Most times I return to see specific performers – last I was keen to see the new Donna, Helen Hobson – a one-time ingénue who was a dazzling Eliza Doolittle in Simon Callow’s otherwise disastrous touring My Fair Lady – now graduating to playing a 40-something mother.
But each time I see it, I marvel anew at how fresh and spontaneous this show makes its material seem. And more importantly, how actively it involves its audience: not in tired singalongs or dance-a-thons (I’ve come to hear the performers sing, not my fellow audience members, than you very much), but rather, like the best musicals, in engaging them in a story that actually care about. And the songs that they already know and love are a key to unlocking a sense of ownership and identification that the audience then bestow on the story, too. It’s thrilling to see an audience literally transported, and Mamma Mia! does that, effortlessly.
While shows like Dancing in the Streets seem to require the audience to pay for the privilege of entertaining themselves by singing and dancing along to imitation acts – Barbara Ellen might have had a fine time there, in that case! – Mamma Mia! is an original and a terrific musical in its own right. Abba’s the bonus track here, in every sense.
