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Tues. June 19 -Sun. June 24 Some things are eternal and it looks like ABBA fandom and the musical based on their music, "Mamma Mia!," are two of them. ABBA graciously gave up the ghost of performing some time ago - rejecting a $1 billion reuion tour - but "Mamma Mia!" will keep them alive into the 22nd century. We saw it in 2004 and, as in 2001. (Skipped the movie.) We recall iit received a few slings and arrows in the press. "Mamma Mia!" is the kind of play that is a punching bag for certain types, both rock types and theater types. But it wasn't for us - a punching bag that is. Well, OK, maybe we took a few solf swats. So, now that it's being revived in Boston at the Opera House June 19-24 - we thought about what we liked then (and would expect to like now) vis-a-vis "Mamma Mia!" and came up with these eight reasons. 1) The Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten professed his love of ABBA (in photo) back in '76 and pl aywright Catherine Johnson, a onetime Brit punk herself, tips her hat when the character called Headbanger Harry talks about selling a Rotten T-shirt. 2) Next to the parody/tribute band Bjorn Again, "Mamma Mia!" is the closest thing you'll see to the real ABBA, which retired years ago and refused a $1 billion offer to reunite, partially Bjorn Ulvaeus told us, because the members aren't exactly as fit and trim as they were in their heyday, and he wanted fans to remember them in their prime. We call this integrity. 3) We've always loved kitsch and camp, and this "Mamma Mia!" has it in spades; the surprise is when we find truly resonant moments underneath the layer cake. 4) Yes, the songs are shoehorned into the plot and vice versa, but so what? Was anyone expecting Moliere? Mamet? Rabe?) There is, agruably, not a more towering majestic breakup song than "Knowing Me, Knowing You." 6) Is there a better power ballad than "The Winner Takes It All?" 7) We like it that the men and women in their 20s and 40s are sexually active and everyone's OK with that. 8) We're a sucker for phonetically sung lyrics by people writing in English who didn't know the language but do so because English is the best-selling language of the pop world. While there is a story involved (a romance!) it's all about the songs of ABBA: the band whose biographical entry begins every pop music encyclopedia. The Swedish quartet composed of two couples - Agnetha Faltskog and Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad - whose first names supply the initials for the moniker. The men wrote the hook-packed, cotton-candy songs, the women sang them, and for several years in the 1970s, they were the world's biggest-selling pop act. But by 1983 they were finished, the couples having split and musical tastes having changed. ABBA's songs were lighter than air ABBA drilled melodies into the heads of anyone listening to Top 40 radio, like it or not. Still, if you'd given any reasonable pop music fan of the 1970s an opportunity to name which bands' music might be pertinent - resonant, even - at the dawn of the next century, it's a pretty good guess ABBA would not have been among their top choices. Or, for that matter, their long-shot choices.
Of course, now ABBA is everywhere. Well, except the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Interesting call, that one, eh? Record sales rival the Beatles and Stones, but, well, it's ABBA. Is the Hall about popular bands or critical darlings? ABBA is embraced all over the world ". . . for some strange reason," said Bjorn Ulvaeus, picking up the thread from his Stockholm home. (We talked six years ago, when “Mamma Mia!” first came to town; so, yes, the interview is dated but the opinions and material is relevent.) "I'm the last one who can explain. Maybe because we had so many hits during the '70s, perhaps when [filmmakers and playwrights] try to illustrate the '70s with music, a lot of people would choose an ABBA song. Other than that I really don't know. I thought when we split up, `Oh well, they might play one or two songs a couple of times a year, but we will be completely forgotten in three years' time. It was so different from all other stuff in the '70s; things were much darker, more somber.” Even ABBA, he notes, explored a "much darker" side on its last three albums. One song from that period, the crescendo-stuffed "Knowing Me, Knowing You," is as grand a breakup song as anything Fleetwood Mac wrote around the same time. "The song itself is kind of uplifting," says Bjorn. Within the breakup is the determination to start anew.
Slagged off by hipsters, the band did earn credibility when Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten said he far preferred ABBA's music to most anything else. "We had some great fans during that time," Bjorn says. "We were a very strange [group to] compliment. The critics didn't like ABBA, but I remember we played Wembley Stadium, and we had [Led Zeppelin's] Jimmy Page [among others] at the party afterwards - people with great credibility, what we didn't have. It was really nice. They understood that we had the same serious attitude that they did about our music. It was only the critics that didn't understand." New generations of critics - those not demanding complex song structure or great lyrical significance - have come around. And no less a rock star and songwriter than U2's Bono calls ABBA "one of the best pop groups that ever was." And there's Bjorn Again,with its verging-on-parody deadpan style. Bjorn says, "In the beginning I had mixed feelings - I thought that they were making fun of us, but in the long run I understand it's more of a tribute." As to Bjorn Again's robotic stage schtick, Bjorn says, "You get that from [watching our] videos - everyone did what they were supposed to do. But other than that, we were not like that in concert at all."
In the late ‘90s, the members of ABBA were offered $1 billion to reunite and tour. They're not idiots. They considered it.
"Of course we discussed it, all four of us," says Bjorn. But as with the Beatles when John Lennon was still alive, the members rejected the idea. "I don't want to go into details, but we came to the conclusion - for personal reasons, mainly - it would not be the right thing to do. We've come too far to walk down that road again, and also, people should remember us for who we were. We were supposed to play a hundred concerts; we would play to tens of thousands, and they would all be disappointed. We wouldn't have had the energy."
Of course, when you turn down a billion bucks, that suggests you've accumulated a bit of cash over the years. In fact, the long-running rumor is that, at its peak, ABBA was the second-biggest corporation in Sweden, behind Volvo.
"That is not true," says Bjorn, with a laugh. "Some PR person dreamed that up, but it is still haunting me." Yes, Bjorn admits, he and his mates made a fair chunk of change. ABBA has sold a reported 350 million albums worldwide.
Looking back, does Bjorn see ABBA's kitsch appeal and camp value? He does. "In the beginning especially," he says. "Our outfits were outrageous and make you cringe today, but those were the days of glamour rock, and there were more people than us that looked like that.The reason we have a great following in the gay community, people tell me, [is] glamour and kitsch."
ABBA forever?
"I hope so." 800-482-8616 www.broadwayacrossamerica.com |
