Trying to make ABBA’s oldies young once again. By Janet Maslin

Björn Ulvaeus, late of the Swedish singing group ABBA, was on a boat off the Corsican coast as he watched live television coverage of the World Trade Center collapsing in flames. Horror kept him from immediately recognizing what would be his own special problem in the disaster’s wake. But a day or two later, Mr Ulvaeus found himself asking: “Can we really go on with this?” In other words, would it be indecent to regale a city in mourning with the exuberant parade of disco-era Swedish-made English-language pop songs that is “Mamma Mia!”?

Halfway around the world, the star of this impending Broadway production was asking herself the same question. Then, to deal with her grief, Louise Pitre took herself to see the musical “42nd Street.” She recalled that she “couldn’t stop crying, watching those poor people doing their tap-dancing with all their might.”

Inspire by the resilience she saw onstage, Ms Pitre came to the same conclusion that Mr Ulvaeus would reach.

“This is how you fight back, this is how you don’t give in,” Mr Ulvaeus decided.

Ms Pitre wound up thinking, “Maybe I’m meant to be here to do this show for people, now of all times.”

The fact that “Mamma Mia!” has been nicknamed “the Lourdes of musicals,” according to one of its producers, Judy Craymer, for its putative effect on even infirm audience members – “they throw down their walking sticks and start to dance,” she said – doubtless played a role in the decision to carry on.

“Mamma Mia!” will open on Thursday with advance ticket sales in the neighborhood of a hefty $27 million and a string of previous successes in its wake. (It is still playing in London, Toronto and Melbourne, Australia.) Yet in some ways it remains the best-kept secret on Broadway. Of the first 100 people lined up to buy tickets when the box office initially opened, according to Phyllida Lloyd, the shows director, almost all of them had already seen it in another city. Beyond the ranks of the initiated, “Mamma Mia!” is apt to be misunderstood.

Is it the story of ABBA, the Swedish foursome (Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anni-Frid) whose first initials made up the group’s name? A bubble-gum period piece? Some kind of kitschy musical revue? Even Ms Pitre, who had been auditioning to play the role of Josephine in a show about Napoleon when someone pegged her as just right for singing “Dancing Queen,” had the impression that “Mamma Mia!” might be something pretty tacky” before she learned what it was all about. “But I figured I could do it for the money,” she said mischievously.

Actually, this $10 million production is a musical with a ready-made hit score, a plot of its own and a way of incorporating the songs that, at least on the evidence of the two performances I attended (in London and New York), leaves audiences grinning ear to ear.

It takes place on a Greek island (that is, a set design in white and radiant sea-blue in the lavishly refurbished “Cats”–free Winter Garden Theater). This is where a middle-aged free spirit named Donna runs a taverna. Donna has a daughter, Sophie, who is about to be married when she decides that she wants her father to attend the wedding. But there is a problem: Donna has refused to tell Sophie who her father is. So Sophie reads her mother’s 21-year-old diary, finds the names of three candidates for paternity, and invites them all to the island on her wedding day. Complications ensue.

So does the need to burst into songs – ABBA songs, of course. The songs have been strung together so that the music cues fit the story. What Ms Pitre called “the ingenious way the songs are worked into the story” is meant to be part of the show’s appeal. It may not be hard to guess where “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” will fit into a musical about a wedding, but the ways in which other songs are deployed requires more cunning. For instance, when one of Donna’s old lovers tells one of her unattached middle-aged friends that he is through with romance, she reflects for a long, coy moment, then sings tentatively, “If you change your mind…” Anyone who has bought some of the 350 million ABBA recordings sold worldwide is liable to spot that as the opening line of “Take a Chance on Me.”

How widely are these songs known? “Everyone in Europe knows ABBA, even if they’re in denial,” said Ms Lloyd, an English director who had never attempted a musical before this, working instead with straight plays and opera. (She and Ms Pitre, a silver-haired French-Canadian dynamo, are making their Broadway debuts.)

Australia knows ABBA even better. Stephan Elliot, the director who put some of their music to flamboyantly good use in his film “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” said that Australia’s dedication to this Swedish group goes way back. “We were just so proud that they were ours, that they had become our own national icon of the 70’s,” he explains in the biographical television documentary “The Winner Takes It All.” “Because nobody else wanted them before we did.”

Once upon a time, the 56-year-old Mr Ulvaeus, who was sedately dressed in black in a recent conversation at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, could be found in metallic platform boots shaking his booty in baby blue satin. “I would say, ‘I want a cape as well,” he remembered, about the group’s crazily space-age stage outfits, which seemed wild even by the standards of the mid-1970s. (Some are currently on display in a Stockholm museum.) But even at the height of popularity, as the group basked in international success from 1973 until its 1982 breakup, the two married couples who constituted ABBA were apt to be taken lightly.

In America, Mr Ulvaeus said, the fact that they barely toured here and that European musical acts were not easily accepted into the pop mainstream, kept ABBA at a distance despite the group’s long string of buoyant hit singles. And those singles were outrageously catchy, what with soaring, sunny harmonies and enough hooks to empty a well-stocked trout pond. Still, it was easier to notice ABBA’s gaudy, outré aspects than to realize how artfully produced their records were, with a booming energy that warranted comparison to Phil Spector’s. Or how closely Mr Ulvaeus and his songwriting partner, Benny Andersson, approximated Sweden’s answer to Brian Wilson.

The globe-trotting, oddly impersonal nature of their songs distanced them further. Why were they summoning Italy (“Mamma Mia”), or Spain (“Chiquitita”) or France (“Voulez-Vous”)? Why invoke Napoleon (“Waterloo”) or Pancho Villa (“Fernando,” in which the two lissome female singers impersonated elderly Mexican freedom fighters)? Were the songs being sung only phonetically, so that “affairs” rhymed with “scarce” (in “Lay All Your Love for Me”) and the group’s English sounded stiffy contrived? As part of their game plan, Mr Ulvaeus and Mr Andersson had decided early on that English must be the language for songs as universally popular as ABBA’s were meant to be.

The group’s feel-good, relentlessly bouncy songs have grown so popular over time that “ABBA Gold,” their greatest-hits collection, remains an evergreen big seller. Yet songs like “S.O.S.” and “Super Trouper” (which Mr Ulvaeus, always looking for memorable phrases, named for a type of stage light) have sustained a kind of anonymity too. And the fact that an audience brings less nostalgic baggage to one of these numbers than a song by The Beatles, for instance, makes the music unexpectedly adaptable to a Broadway context, because it had no real context of its own. Mr Ulvaeus said that his material now sounds more like the score of “Mamma Mia!” to him than like a set of individual hits from the glitter-happy past.

Neither he nor any of the other group members (who have gone their separate ways, with only the two men involved in “Mamma Mia!”) ever envisioned such a theatrical adaptation until Ms Craymer, the producer, began suggesting the idea 12 years ago. Ms Craymer, like Ms Pitre (“I loved funk”) and Ms Lloyd (“I was more of a Beatles type”), was not exactly an ABBA fan, being more partial to Led Zeppelin. But she had worked with Mr Andersson and Mr Ulvaeus – who endured as a songwriting team after the group broke up and both couples divorced – on the musical Chess, for which they wrote the music and Tim Rice the lyrics. When that show, a famous flop in New York, arrived in 1988 and “we were slaughtered,” in Mr Ulvaeus’s words, it looked as if there would be no more stage productions in the composers’ future. But Ms Craymer helped change their minds.

At first, she proposed a television program built around ABBA songs, but the idea soon grew in scope. She began to realize that the songs had a kind of chronology, with some sounding youthfully effervescent (“Honey, Honey”) and others more world-wearily mature (“The Winner Takes It All”). To Ms Craymer and Catherine Johnson, who wrote the book for “Mamma Mia!” this suggested two generations of women. Then those women became mother and daughter. Ultimately, with a dash of inspiration from the 1968 Gina Lollobrigida film “Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell,” the idea of a woman with three possible fathers for her child was introduced.

Ms Lloyd said that she was drawn to “Mamma Mia!” by “something quite serious underneath it.” It made her mindful of “those women of the 1970’s who fought to gain independence for us and are now discouraged to find their daughters rushing to the alter at age 19.”

The setting became an island with slightly magical properties and an “Anglo-Saxon” nature, according to Mr Ulvaeus, who is one of the show’s producers. But which island? Australia was a possible setting until the collaborators ruled it out for pragmatic reasons: it would have been too expensive for the wedding guests to travel there.

That kind of thinking came from Mr Ulvaeus, who greatly enjoyed the gamesmanship involved in the project. “I saw it as an experiment and a challenge, and I was always ready to break it off if it didn’t work,” he said. “It was sort of 50-50 whether it would come together.” So he offered the use of anything from ABBA’s catalog of 90-odd songs, with certain provisions. First, the music had to make sense within the story. (That is why “Fernando” is only hummed for a few seconds; there was no place for Pancho Villa’s loyalists.) And the lyrics could not be changed. With few exceptions, they haven’t been. “It’s 99.5 percent the original versions, and that’s enough for me,” Mr Ulvaeus said.

The same emphasis on logic prevailed with the staging: frequently, only a few singers are visible, while the rest of the chorus adds background vocals from behind the scenes, to approximate the full-bodied energy of ABBA’s recordings. This means that “Dancing Queen,” one of the group’s full-throttle super-hits, is ostensibly sung only by Donna and her two best friends as they romp around her living quarters. Why couldn’t the effect be amplified by a full supply of singers and dancers onstage? “What would they be doing in her bedroom?” Mr Ulvaeus inquired.

But lest the audience feel cheated, “Mamma Mia!” packs a final surprise: a post-encore reprise done in full 1970s regalia, in which the whole audience often takes part, singing along with “Dancing Queen” and more. “They know these songs so well,” Mr Ulvaeus said. “And they get into the story, so they don’t sing along – thank God. It feels right to invite them after the show to have a good time.”

On the evening of the final dress rehearsal before an audience 10 days ago, with “Wet Paint” signs still tacked to the concession stand in the newly brightened Winter Garden (which was decorated in black for the 18-year reign of “Cats”), Ms Lloyd sat in one of the lounges, somehow resisting the impulse to move any part of her body while a full orchestra rehearsed “Dancing Queen.” But then again, she had guided the show from London (where it is still going strong) through the North American tour that has starred Ms Pitre and now culminates with a production on Broadway.

“There was no way Benny and Björn would let it go straight to Broadway because of “Chess,” ” Ms Craymer said about “Mamma Mia!” To the extent that they can – and, after September 11, Mr Ulvaeus fully understands how illusory that now is – the production team has avoided leaving anything to chance.

That night, after the audience arrived, Ms Lloyd appeared onstage to introduce “the first performance by non animals in this theater” to hearty applause. Then, from a disembodied voice, came another announcement: “We must warm patrons of a nervous disposition that platform boots and white Spandex are featured in this production.”

And then it was time to find out whether there would be any cries of “S.O.S.” beyond those in that familiar song. Or whether Broadway’s “Mamma Mia!” would prove itself a Super Trouper after all. Transcribed for ABBA World

Photo: Judy Kaye, right, Louis Pitre and Karen Mason in the musical “Mamma Mia!” at the Winter Garden.

The New York Times (Arts & Leisure) · Sunday, 14 October 2001 (Pages 1, 26 & 27)

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