The stage musical of Mamma Mia! ran on Broadway for 5,758 performances and I somehow managed to miss 5,758 of them. If you did too, fear not. If there is no production of this show currently playing near you, wait a few weeks and there will be one opening…and I don't just mean this year. I mean for all eternity. Long after the complete works of Shakespeare are laying forgotten and unperformed, someone will be doing Mamma Mia! in your town.
I vaguely recall seeing the movie and thinking…
- The songs of ABBA are fun and often hard to eject from your skull once they find a place to reside within your neurocranium —
- — but I think I liked them better in the original ABBA recordings.
- Also, the plot of Mamma Mia! is of just about no interest to me —
- — and isn't it weird that someone had to come up with a storyline to wrap around all those ABBA songs to create a musical for the whole family and they said, "How about a story of a young woman trying to figure out which of the many men her mother slept with is her father?
- — and the songs don't always fit the story that well —
- — but who cares?
And that's about all I remember of the film except that in the end, all the main actors were in these weird ABBA costumes and singing the Greatest Hits without some phony concept wrapped around them, and one of them was "Waterloo" which apparently no one could shoehorn into the plot…and that was the best part.
Okay. So last night, I went to see a stage production of Mamma Mia! down at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, which is a Broadway-class theater that's not as far from Los Angeles as it sounds. I've been there a lot and the shows there, no matter who produces them, are almost always worth the drive. This one was produced by a company called 3-D Theatricals which was responsible for the stagings of Young Frankenstein, Spamalot and a few others that I didn't write about that I took Amber to see there.
Amber was busy with schoolwork this weekend so instead I took my friend Laraine Newman — and she wanted to go in part for the same reason I wanted to go in part: One of the leads in the play was our friend Candi Milo. Candi is a wonderful actress on stage and also in front of a microphone when she's doing cartoon voices. Maybe we're prejudiced but we both thought she was out and away the best performer on that stage.
Not that there weren't others. I suspect the folks who made up ABBA would have been real happy hearing Sophina Brown belting their lyrics and Flynn Hayward was quite adorable as her daughter Sophie. Promos for the show said this was the first time those two roles had been cast with black performers and apart from one line about Sophie's "golden tresses," it didn't matter one bit. Theatrical audiences have happily become totally color-blind. Would that the whole country was that way.
We were seated second row center, close enough to get a "contact high" (a term I never liked) from the performers on stage. As with other productions I've seen there, the actors — the dancers, especially — were having such a good time up there, the joy was infectious. Here — you may even feel a little of it in this 90-second promo video for the production…
As with the film, the best part of the show was the encore sequence at the end (including "Waterloo"). I still don't like the story or how awkwardly it leads into and out of most of the songs but like the bullet point above says, who cares? There was some great hoofing up there and some great voices and a lot of enthusiasm and good costuming and sets (all newly-designed for the occasion) so Laraine and I were both very glad we made the trek to Redondo Beach.
Sadly, the matinee today there is the last time 3-D Theatricals is putting a show into that building. Next weekend, this production moves into the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which is about twenty minutes to the south. Future shows mounted by 3-D Theatricals will start there and stay there, commencing with 42nd Street in October. I don't think I'll be making that commute quite as often. If you want to see their Mamma Mia!, you'll need to go to Cerritos. Here's a link to order tickets but you'd better hurry. It's only there for two weeks and Candi said they're almost sold out. I'm not surprised.