‘Mamma Mia!’ Is Back on Broadway. But Did It Ever Really Leave?

Abba jukebox musical “Mamma Mia!” is back on Broadway, but don’t call it a revival. No, this is “a return engagement” of the initial New York staging, which closed 10 years ago. You might interpret that move as a reluctance by the show’s producers to spend financial and creative capital on a new version when they can bank on audiences eager to see the ur-feel good show in its original state.
Or you could see it as the closest we may ever come to a real-life time loop.
Whether it’s successive generations discovering, like clockwork, Abba’s music or the unsinkable “Mamma Mia!” itself, anything related to the Swedish quartet seems to reset every time the world appears ready to move on. Even the band’s name is a palindromic perfect circle with no end or maybe no escape.
Similarly, the echo-y title of the musical is made up of just three letters forming an infinite hall of mirrors. An appropriate image, because since its world premiere in 1999 in London — where it has been playing since — “Mamma Mia!” has been an everlasting part of the pop-culture landscape.
From a wider angle, the show’s influence reverberates all over commercial theater, where it ushered in the modern era of jukebox musicals, which for the most part used to be revues organized around a genre, a scene or a musician — think “Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” or “Jelly’s Last Jam.” With “Mamma Mia!” came story-driven books, as well as an often close collaboration with the songs’ creators (a trend illustrated by the artistic and commercial successes of the Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” and “& Juliet,” featuring the music of Swedish songwriter and producer Max Martin).
It feels as if at any given minute “Mamma Mia!” is playing somewhere in the world, on land or on sea. The immersive spinoff “Mamma Mia! The Party,” which is quite popular in Britain, has further reinforced the image of “Mamma Mia!” as a beloved escape hatch from any gray day. The 2008 film version was the highest-grossing adaptation of a Broadway musical until Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” came along, and even the misfire of a sequel, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” (2018), did not inflict a mortal wound to the brand.
Now it is back at the Winter Garden, where “Mamma Mia!” had its Broadway opening in 2001 and where the 25th-anniversary North American tour is making a pit stop before heading to Wilmington, North Carolina, in March. (Shows picking up where they left off is a bit of a thing on Broadway this fall, with the “Beetlejuice” tour also having a layover, possibly because some hard-core fans said the title three times.)

Despite being slightly downscaled for the road — most notably in a set that feels a little flimsy — this is a fine iteration of “Mamma Mia!” It certainly is sprightlier than it was the last time I saw the show, dejectedly limping toward the end of the first Broadway run. The band, under Will Van Dyke’s direction, was percolating with precise energy at the performance I attended, and the cast members had a spring in their step moving through Phyllida Lloyd’s staging and Anthony Van Laast’s choreography.
Now, if we must, a quick plot recap for those who have somehow avoided the “Mamma Mia!” orbital pull. On the eve of her wedding, 20-year-old Sophie (Amy Weaver) lures three men to the Greek island where she lives so she can suss out which one is her dad. Her mother, Donna (Christine Sherrill), isn’t thrilled to see her old flings resurface, but at least she gets moral support from her besties, Rosie and Tanya (the scene-stealing Carly Sakolove and Jalynn Steele, both in great comic form).
Of course, it’s possible to nitpick. A quarter-century in, and some plot points will never make sense. (Where and how did Sophie meet her two best friends again?) And though Sherrill is a powerful belter, she has a certain steeliness that saps Donna’s 11 o’clock number, “The Winner Takes It All,” from the required pathos and vulnerability.
As sunny as the musical is, its score is by a band that came from the “melancholy belt, sometimes mistaken for the vodka belt,” as Abba’s Benny Andersson put it in 2010 during his acceptance speech at the band’s induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The secret sauce of many of the songs is that they are dopamine hits with a blue chaser.
“Mamma Mia!” is based on Abba material, so it reflects that band’s style, and the musical’s very structure also nods to the famous circular name: The show starts with Sophie wistfully warbling a snippet of “I Have a Dream” and returns to that song at the end. Or rather at the fake end, because after the curtain call comes a stand-alone encore (a move later imitated in jukeboxes like “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”). You think it’s over, but it’s not, because nothing ever really ends in the Abbaverse. —NYT