{"id":84436,"date":"2025-08-15T09:43:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T09:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/84436\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T09:43:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T09:43:06","slug":"its-now-a-double-layer-cake-of-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/84436\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Now a Double Layer Cake of Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tI have a theory about the music of ABBA<\/a> (it\u2019s just my experience, but maybe it\u2019s yours too). Their songs, composed and produced by Benny Andersson and Bj\u00f6rn Ulvaeus and sung by Agnetha F\u00e4ltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, are so propulsively beautiful, so catchy and timeless and addictive, so sublime in their blend of joy and heartbreak that your all-time favorite ABBA song will always be\u2026 the one you happen to be listening to.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMamma Mia!<\/a>,\u201d the indelibly exuberant jukebox musical that\u2019s being revived on Broadway for a six-month limited engagement (it opens tonight at the Winter Garden Theater, where the original Broadway production opened in 2001 and ran for 14 years), is a show built around the belief that each and every ABBA song is its own perfect epiphany of pop rapture. There are no lame numbers, no filler; the show is all high points, which is why it generates a kind of wall-to-wall karaoke ecstasy. For the audiences that have flocked to \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d over the last 25 years, and will now continue to do so, hearing those songs can make one feel like the music-fan equivalent of a blissed-out cokehead doing lines. You just want another, and another, and another\u2026\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEvery jukebox musical exists, by definition, to serve the music at its center. But no jukebox musical has ever worked in quite the clever-absurdist way that \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d does. As everyone knows (after 50 international productions, plus the 2008 Meryl Streep movie version and its 2018 sequel; a third film is in the works), the plot of \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d is a piece of high-kitsch silliness that suggests Shakespeare in his amorous-comedy mode trying to bring off a romantic version of \u201cGilligan\u2019s Island.\u201d The setting is a sunny Greek isle, and the central character, Donna, is a free-spirited single mother who owns and operates a taverna there. Her 20-year-old daughter, Sophie, is about to get married. But who is Sophie\u2019s father?<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter poring through her mother\u2019s diary, Sophie realizes that it could have been any of Donna\u2019s three suitors from the far-off world of Europe in 1979 (which is when and where she got pregnant). So Sophie invites all three of them to the wedding. Before she gets hitched, she wants to find out who her dad is\u2026and who she is.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMamma Mia!\u201d is kind of a romantic comedy, but more than that it\u2019s about romance: its place in the world, and the way that shifts from generation to generation. (That\u2019s changed a lot since \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d first opened.) But part of the musical\u2019s knowing joke is that its plot, in almost every detail, is like a machine that\u2019s been reverse-engineered to serve as a delivery system for 22 ABBA songs. Make no mistake: The storyline works (in the end it\u2019s rather touching). But it also feels like something that might have been devised by an AI program that liked ABBA. The show practically invites us to chuckle at the neatly interlocked way that a song like \u201cHoney, Honey\u201d or \u201cKnowing Me, Knowing You\u201d will dovetail with the (thin) motivation for singing it.\u00a0And that\u2019s why the dithery sweet mindlessness of \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d is part of its magic. The show serves as a friendly frame for the songs without threatening to get in the way of them.<\/p>\n

\n\tI saw the original stage version three times, and while the revived \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d has its own spirit (which I would call slightly more bumptious, with more aggressive choreography), it\u2019s really the same show. It\u2019s directed, like the original (and like the 2008 movie version), by Phyllida Lloyd, and it remains scrupulously faithful to what she did the first time.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs in: It\u2019s got the same blocky rotating two-piece set that looks like the walls of a taverna as whitewashed by IKEA. The same wistful opening and closing, built around the haunting strains of \u201cI Have a Dream.\u201d The same show-stopping, we\u2019re-going-to-let-our-middle-aged-freak-flag-fly scenes with Donna (Christine Sherrill) and her two old pals, Rosie (Carly Sakolove) and Tanya (Jalynn Steele), the former back-up singers of Donna and the Dynamos. The same sung-into-a-hair-dryer version of \u201cDancing Queen,\u201d the same shock-comedy chorus line of snorkelers in flippers during \u201cLay All Your Love On Me,\u201d the same giggle-out-loud moment when one of the Dynamos launches into the opening lyrics of\u00a0 \u201cChiquitita\u201d to console her friend, and you realize that\u2019s all the motivation this show is going to need to hang a song on. (The real motivation is: Here\u2019s the song! Feast on it!)<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s also got the same daffy affectionate high-camp acting by the three potential dads: Sam (Victor Wallace), the architect who designed the taverna; Bill (Jim Newman), the corny globe-trotting writer; and Harry (Rob Marnell), the token Brit who was once a \u201chead-banger\u201d and is now the soul of middle-classness. And it\u2019s got the same show-stopping dramatic high point: Donna\u2019s rendition of \u201cThe Winner Takes It All,\u201d which as sung by Christine Sherrill is so wrenching that it earns the rare distinction of being even more powerful than ABBA\u2019s version.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf there\u2019s a difference between how \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d felt when it first opened and how it feels today, it is this: The show is now a double layer cake of nostalgia. Back in 2001, it tapped into our river of pent-up nostalgia for ABBA \u2014 as well as the revelation, late in coming for so many listeners, that ABBA was as great a pop group as the greatest pop groups there ever were. In every other case, we knew it at the time. We knew that the Beatles were great when they were happening; same for the Stones or the Bee Gees or Steely Dan or Zeppelin or Madonna. We knew that punk was a barb-wire game changer.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in the 1970s, when ABBA had become the most successful pop group since the Beatles, no one dared to mention them in the same breath as\u2026 the Beatles. And to suggest that they should be would have come off as blasphemy. (To many it still would.) ABBA were Swedish, they dressed on stage like glam disco astronauts, and they were thought of as gifted purveyors of infectious throwaway bubble-gum pop. That what their songs added up to was a full-scale vision of the ins and outs of love and loss and romance and pain and desire and fulfillment, told entirely from a woman\u2019s point of view, is part of the reason their genius wasn\u2019t fully recognized and respected.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll that changed in the \u201990s. The culture caught up with ABBA, stripping the \u201cguilty pleasure\u201d label away from pop masterpieces like \u201cDancing Queen\u201d and \u201cTake a Chance on Me\u201d and \u201cSuper Trouper\u201d and \u201cMoney, Money, Money.\u201d The culmination of that evolution was \u201cMamma Mia!,\u201d a show that was, and remains, a two-and-a-half-hour pop rhapsody of delight.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s different, after 25 years of all that freshly unashamed ABBA love, is that our wistful nostalgia isn\u2019t just for ABBA anymore. It\u2019s also for \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d itself, which now plays as a period piece from a different world. The show, when it premiered, was set 21 years after 1979 (in other words: the present day), and its theme was expressed in the counterpoint between Donna, the \u201970s feminist who had gone her own way, having a child on her own and starting her own business in the foreign land of Greece, and Sophie, who rebelled against her mother\u2019s independence by\u2026 deciding to get married, to the beach-bum dreamboat Sky (Grant Reynolds), at age 20! In its way, this cute reversal expressed something: that old-fashioned romance was making a comeback. That\u2019s why we also had a deluge of rom-coms.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the rom-com, in case you hadn\u2019t noticed, has done a slow fade. It\u2019s not gone, but it\u2019s hanging on by its lacquered fingernails, and that ties into the way our reigning pop-music queens, from Taylor Swift to Beyonc\u00e9 to Olivia Rodrigo to Billie Eilish, now often sing of love with bitter skepticism. The voices of ABBA sometimes gazed at men with anguish and doubt (just think of the sinister vibe of \u201cMoney, Money, Money\u201d) but mostly with yearning. And that now makes \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d a piece of cockeyed romantic optimism that is, in a certain way, a bit out of step with the times. More than ever, the show seems to be challenging the world around it to meet the sincerity of its passion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are countless moments in the new version that I adored: the enthralling ominous momentum that builds up around \u201cGimme! Gimme! Gimme!,\u201d as Sophie\u2019s three dads each offer to give her away at the wedding; the scene-stealingly haughty Jalynn Steele turning \u201cDoes Your Mother Know\u201d into a lusty slapstick tour de force; Rob Marnell\u2019s plaintive rendition of the gorgeous-enough-to-be-an-ABBA-classic \u201cOur Last Summer\u201d; the transporting blend of Christine Sherrill and Victor Wallace\u2019s voices on \u201cS.O.S.\u201d; and that ecstatic grand finale, which brings us full circle to the arena-rock dreams of the \u201970s.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are also a few glitchy elements. The orchestra, faithfully recreating ABBA\u2019s arrangements, can be a bit loud, at times overpowering the vocal performances, especially Amy Weaver\u2019s. (Maybe she just needs to belt a bit more.) The whole production feels busier than the original, and I\u2019m not sure it needed to be. Yet \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d remains what it always was: a feast for your pleasure centers. It\u2019s a show that almost invites us to roll our eyes at it \u2014 until that moment or two later when we\u2019re inevitably going, My, my, how can I resist you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have a theory about the music of ABBA (it\u2019s just my experience, but maybe it\u2019s yours too).…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[8245,88,58627],"class_list":{"0":"post-84436","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-abba","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-mamma-mia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}