The guilty pleasures of Mamma Mia! Broadway Across Canada at the Jube, a review, Theater News

By Liz Nicholls,

Mamma Mia! is one of those shows that’s made to be called a guilty pleasure.

There’s no use having a guilty pleasure that’s decaf instead of double full-fat cinnamon dolce latte with a shot and sprinkles. And a globe-trotting quarter century-old jukebox musical designed expressly to be a hanger for 22 ridiculously catchy ‘70s hits by the Swedish pop confection ABBA, amply qualifies as fun without consequences.

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Edmonton audiences have seen it before, most recently at the Citadel and the Mayfield — “we know the start, we know the end” — but c’mon, to qualify, guilty pleasures aren’t one-offs. So, good news for your sweet tooth, Mamma Mia! is back again, singing and dancing (“without song and dance what are we?” ask the Scando sages), on the Jube stage in a sparkly, give’er, hysteria-prone Broadway Across Canada touring production. “And here we go again…. We’ve done it all before, and now we’re back to get some more.”

There is no use arguing that Mamma Mia! feels dated. Of course it does. That, my fun-loving friends, is the point of this early pioneer of the jukebox musical, even when it first opened in the West End in 1999, even before it took its silver platform boots across the pond (it may have walked on water). And you’ll already know this if the mere thought of Mamma Mia! reactivates the incurably catchy title song from the wings of your brain where it’s been lurking, biding its time.    

The cast of Mamma Mia! Broadway Across Canada Touring. Photo by Joan Marcus

Mamma Mia! is nostalgia capture, a time capsule containing our younger, thinner, dancier, more fun-seeking selves. “You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life.” That’s the name of the game, as the packed opening night crowd mostly female and surprisingly all ages (with considerable disco bell-bottom content), confirmed by their enthusiasm for every song, and archival knowledge of their opening chords. The woman sitting in the row ahead had an impressive top-knot bun that started bobbing to the first notes of the overture, and never stopped for 2 1/2 hours.

What pastes the whole thing together, more or less, is a “story” by the now filthy-rich Brit Fringe playwright Catherine Johnson, that’s bend-y, flimsy and blithely preposterous enough that the immortal ABBA lyrics don’t even have to be altered. I must admit, though, as multiple viewings of Mamma Mia! have reinforced over the years, that musical theatre’s natural inclination to make you actually listen to the lyrics doesn’t do ABBA any favours.

Jessica Crouch (centre) in Mamma Mia!, Broadway Across Canada Touring. Photo by Joan Marcus

Anyhow, there’s Donna (Jessica Crouch), a feisty stressed-out single-mother who used to be in a girl group, Donna and the Dynamos, and be a lot of fun at parties. Now she owns a Greek island taverna with mortgage pressures. Ah yes, that’s an appealing setting, witness Mark Thompson’s simple but atmospheric design, lighted in glowing seascape sunrise/sunset colours by Howard Harrison to conjure Greece onstage. And if you get bored when the going gets more “serious” in Act II, you can amuse yourself imagining Shirley Valentine showing up at Donna’s taverna.

But I digress. The crux of the story is that Donna’s fresh-faced 20 year-old daughter Sophie (Juliette M. Ojeda) is getting married to Sky (Grant Reynolds), on the morrow. And motivated by a compelling need to know who her dad is (the great unanswered question of her life, she says), Sophie secretly steals three names out of her mom’s diary and invites them, three possible dads, to her wedding. That’s it. The beachwear is quite a bit more complicated than the plot.

Anyhow, after Sophie’s echo-y rendition of I Have A Dream, repurposed for the occasion under a giant moon, the opening scenes are all about entrances. First, in an outburst of frenzy, shrieking, and giddiness that do make you wonder what’s in that blue Aegean water, Sophie’s besties arrival. Then, Donna’s amusing girl group pals Rosie (Carly Sakolove) and Tanya (Jalynn Steele), ready to take up where they left off. And then there’s the three dads, with contrasting accents, luggage,  and careers: Sam (Victor Wallace) the rueful architect, Bill (Leland Burnett) the Texan travel writer, and Harry (Blake Price) the Brit banker.

The highlight of the frantic Act I bustle is that Rosie and Tanya dip into a tickle trunk, get all costumed up, coax Donna to join in, and suddenly, boom! they’re singing Dancing Queen. In a musical full of big high-energy dance numbers, this is a particularly comic one. The interplay between Sakolove, who’s self-mocking and droll, and Steele, who’s a worldlier sort of high-camp comic diva, is a hoot.

In this production, maybe more than any other I’ve seen, characters not only throw themselves with brio into putting on a show, but actually act out the song lyrics, with outrageous go-for-the-grotesque broad comedy, and outsized grimaces and raised eyebrows (OK, mugging is just not a criminal offence in this part of Greece, apparently, so lighten up).

Dominic Young and Jalynn Steele in Mamma Mia!, Broadway Across Canada Touring. Photo by Joan Marcus

In short they do their own comic semaphore; they act out their own captions. And the distance between doing Mamma Mia! and doing an outsized parody of Mamma Mia! shrinks into nothingness. So the dance number between Tanya and horny young bartender Pepper (Dominic Young), which has ick potential, is inventively choreographed  comic pratfalls. And so, to the audience’s particular delight, is Rosie’s acrobatic pursuit of one of the dads, to Take A Chance On Me. And speaking of the pursuit of comedy, that certainly applies to Anthony Van Laast’s ingenious choreography for a chorus line of hunky guys in wet suits with flippers.   

I’ll be in the minority here, but I prefer the zestful fun of the comic scenes where the characters are playful about performing for each other, and dancing up a storm to the more dramatic moments, the ones with soul-wracking ABBA ballads that leave you to ponder something thin and silly you really shouldn’t be thinking about at all, i.e. the story.

But there are exceptions. As Donna, Crouch who has a powerful versatile belt voice, nails an 11 o’clock number, a version of The Winner Takes It All, like a rock star and there’s no tomorrow. And the placement of the song actually makes sense. In a quiet mother-daughter scene that’s free of histrionics, Donna makes Slipping Through My Fingers, in which Donna reflects on losing her little girl to wedded bliss at 20, wistful and convincing.

But elsewhere, Wallace’s Sam, who has a great musical theatre voice, is left to sing Knowing Me, Knowing You re-cast as thoughtful life advice about breaking up — what? preemptively? — addressed to the bride-to-be. Huh? Sophie understandably sits there looking puzzled. As Lay All Your Love On Me has it, “don’t go wasting your emotion” — on the whole, much better counsel.

Don’t miss the curtain call, the final guilty pleasure. You’ll have the fun of fab costumes, a cast of singer/dancers who never say when, and ABBA hits without the burden of the play. And that’s where the audience sent its biggest wave appreciation on opening night.

REVIEW

Mamma Mia!

Broadway Across Canada Touring 

Created by: Songs by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, book by Catherine Johnson

Directed by: Phyllida Lloyd

Starring: Juliette M Ojeda, Jessica Crouch, Grant Reynolds, Carly Sakolove, Jalynn Steele, Victor Wallace, Blake Price, Leland Burnett, Dominic Young, Steven Gagliano, Maddie Garbaty, Lena Owens, Tony Clements

Where: Jubilee Auditorium

Running: through Sunday

Tickets: ticketmaster.ca