Mamma Mia! Broadway Reviews

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.

The return of Mamma Mia! to Broadway, “for a limited six-month engagement,” is bargaining on ABBA fans’ eternal desire to hear their favorite songs again (and again). Judging by the man tapping his feet behind me, the many hands waving in the air, and the whooping that accompanied the show’s better-executed set pieces, its producers and the Winter Garden Theatre could be right in calculating on one of theater’s surer bets.

Two and a half decades after its sun-soaked pop fantasy arrived in England, Mamma Mia! lives on in an eternal end of history — specifically, the 1990s. The boomers get older, the world grows unstable (remember, this show premiered on Broadway in October 2001). But Mamma Mia! does not change. When you head into the Winter Garden Theatre this summer, Donna Sheridan, the expat hotel manager whose daughter has decided to invite her three possible fathers to her wedding, is still blithely refusing to learn what the internet is. She is still someone who was cavorting around in the 1970s with her girl group. There are still perky young men in wetsuits to flirt with and brooding old flames who followed those rising late-20th-century market tides from the counterculture into banking, architecture, and travel writing. But if the show’s universe refuses to age, that doesn’t mean the musical itself can’t tarnish. The title still carries that big old exclamation point, but the fantasy is more than a little long in the tooth. Maybe it should be styled with a question mark, or just an ellipsis. Mamma mia … they sure do sing a bunch of ABBA songs.

The sound designers turn up the volume to loud, but not painfully so; the nine musicians in the orchestra pit provide a happy semblance of that distinctively stainless, steely, Swedish ABBA sound; and their hits just keep on coming. Make sure to stick around for the megamix finale of reprises crowned by “Waterloo.”

The area where this Mamma Mia! is far from deficient is in the cast. While there’s not a single Broadway marquee name among them, not a one isn’t giving an outstanding performance, not a one undeserving of marquee status. They prominently include Christine Sherrill as single mom Donna Sheridan; Amy Weaver as bride-to-be Sophie Sheridan; Jalynn Steele and Carly Sakolove as Donna BFFs Tanya and Rosie; and Rob Marnell, Jim Newman, and Victor Wallace as possible fathers Harry Bright, Bill Austin, and Sam Carmichael.

Book writer Catherine Johnson deserves credit for trying to make the mother-daughter relationship resonate, although she is more often lauded for having worked in twenty-two ABBA songs into the story in sometimes clever ways, without changing almost any of the lyrics. But the lyrics don’t always fit snugly with the narrative; and some of the melodies – all of which were already oldies when the musical debuted – aren’t really evergreens. A reimagined “Mamma Mia” could have benefitted from dropping some of the songs, and making the show shorter.

Well, I say, 'thank you for the musical.' 'Mamma Mia!' is a much-needed vacation from all the seriousness and drear. And its foundations could withstand a nuclear blast. The foremother of the old-pop-songs-in-a-new-story genre is still the very best in the game.

If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment.

The ninth-longest running Broadway show of all time, Mamma Mia! ran for 14 years at the Winter Garden following its opening shortly after the Towers fell. This touring production’s stop at the Garden has all the makings of a homecoming, and it’s a strenuously joyous one.

I saw the original stage version three times, and while the revived “Mamma Mia!” has its own spirit (which I would call slightly more bumptious, with more aggressive choreography), it’s really the same show. It’s 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.

Now, they'll get the chance to do just that as the musical returns to its original home — the Winter Garden Theatre — for a six-month-long limited engagement that may not reinvent the material, but is still every bit the dreamy, endlessly endearing experience that fans know and love.

The “Mamma Mia!” that opened Thursday at the Winter Garden is a touring production, and at intermission I was not thinking of the recently destroyed World Trade Center. I went much further back, to the 1970s when vanity productions like “Angel,” “Doctor Jazz,” “Got tu Go Disco” and “Platinum” took up their brief residences on the Rialto among now-classic shows by Sondheim, Kander & Ebb and Lloyd Webber. The current “Mamma Mia!” remains under the control of its original director, Phyllida Lloyd; production designer, Mark Thompson; and other creatives. Frankly, the show looks so tacky that it could be the original 2001 production with a not-very-good paint job.

The big takeaway for me is that even as the U.S. underestimated this band, so Broadway underestimated this brand. It’s a one of a kind. Just watch how many people will come and have fun. Limited run? We’ll see.

Sure, the set is even more basic than it was, the cast has completely changed (in some cases for the better), and the audience seems even younger. But the infectious music of Swedish supergroup ABBA can still make you sing and dance in your seat, bringing an almost-constant smile to your face even as you remember (or, for first timers, realize) just how inanely some of their two dozen mega-hits have been shoehorned into Catherine Johnson’s relatively ridiculous book.

Nobody could mistake Mamma Mia! for high art. Cardboard-cutout characters vamp through a ridiculous romantic plot, while beloved disco-era ABBA hits are shoehorned in often as clumsily as Cinderella’s prince struggling to find the perfect fit for the lost slipper of his royal-ball dancing partner. But audiences still thrill to dancing queens. And Mamma Mia!, returning to Broadway nearly a quarter century after it began a long and glorious run at the Winter Garden Theatre (and later the Broadhurst), has an infectious, high-energy showmanship that’s almost irrepressible.