February 17, 2005
By Lucille Davie
WANNA have the time of your life? It's easy - buy a ticket to the musical "Mamma Mia!", get to Sandton, find your seat, sit down, and then wait to be knocked out of that seat by the singing, dancing and sheer exuberance that bounces out from the stage.
"Mamma Mia!" has just hit South Africa, and you can now be one of the 18 000 happy people who see the show worldwide every night. Across the world more than 20 million people have seen it, in 13 productions. For good reason - they all know how to have the time of their lives.
The musical, written around the hit songs of that 1970s and 1980s pop supergroup Abba, has all the traditional elements that make for a successful story: a lost parent, a search for identity, an old romance, a wedding. Throw in some extremely popular songs, great singing and great costumes, and you have something that is rare on stage: top-class entertainment that bridges the generation gap, leaving the audience with extreme feelings of good-to-be-alive contentment.
The story is straightforward. A single mother and her daughter are happily ensconced on a Greek island, preparing for the daughter's wedding. The daughter, who has never known her father, finds out that she has three possible dads. She decides to invite all three men to the wedding, hoping to find out which is her real father. Her mother is surprised to find three men from her past on her doorstep. The wedding goes ahead, but is the daughter the one who gets married?
Superb choreography and lighting bring the stage alive to the immortal songs of Abba: "Dancing Queen", "Super Trouper", "Knowing Me, Knowing You", "Honey, Honey", "Take A Chance On Me", and many more.
Phyllida Lloyd, the director, says the crew searched three continents for people with "MMF" qualities - the Mamma Mia! factor, summed up as "a spirit, an earthiness, a wit all wrapped up in a big personality". I, for one, can tell her unreservedly she found them in the cast she brought to South Africa and no doubt in the casts playing around the world.
"When we found them, we tried to exploit their special gifts," she adds. This meant adapting the musical to each country's distinctive character. For example, describing an attractive character in the play on a London stage is: "He's a bit of all right"; in Canada it is: "He's a tall drink of water"; and in Australia it is: "He's a hefty slice of the Outback".
In April 1974 Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Waterloo". This was followed by hit after hit in Europe, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Zimbabwe and Japan. Abba sold more than 350 million records worldwide before breaking up in 1982. And the group is still selling: 3 500 albums are sold every day around the world.
"Mamma Mia!" has a cast of 60, including musicians and crew, with tons of imported stage equipment, costumes and props, including 250 pairs of shoes.
The musical opened on the London stage five years ago (where it is still playing) and has played in 85 major cities since then, grossing more than $8-million (about R48-million) a week, or more than $1-billion in total. It has been seen in the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and South Korea.
One critic proclaimed, "This production could put Prozac out of business!" I don't know about that, but I do know I had the time of my life for three hours last night.
It runs until 4 March at the Sandton Convention Centre, moving to Cape Town on 9 March and Durban on 25 March. Booking is at Computicket.
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