MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN — FOR THE LAST TIME?
Actor reflects on his spandex moment during ‘farewell tour’ performance
We may have to face it: This time we’re through. Maybe.
It seems like the love affair between the long-running ABBA musical, Mamma Mia!, and adoring Broadway audiences may be coming to an end, now that it is embarking on what is billed as its farewell tour (it reaches Place des Arts on Feb. 17 for a threeday run).
The show still has the imprint of its original director, Phyllida Lloyd, whose all-female Shakespearean trilogy recently wowed London audiences.
It’s not too much of a stretch to point out that the plot of Mamma Mia! is pure Shakespearean comedy, too: An exiled ruler (of a crumbling taverna) lives on an exotic Mediterranean island with her only daughter, Sophie, a headstrong young woman who secretly invites three men to her wedding in the belief that one of them is her father.
Playwright Catherine Johnson didn’t trouble herself with too much psychological subtext, though, and instead of complex soliloquies there are over 20 ABBA smash hits (plus one or two minor league ones: Slipping Through My Fingers definitely slipped under my radar). That’s enough to make Mamma Mia! one of the most successful musicals of all time and arguably the first in a long line of jukebox musicals that have conquered — or infested, depending on your tastes — the West End and Broadway ever since.
First seen in London in 1999 after the producers persuaded songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus that their back catalogue could be pure West End gold, Mamma Mia! made its Broadway debut soon after 9/11, offering a much needed burst of escapist joy.
“There was a lot of darkness and it brought light to the city,” says Manhattan-based actor Andrew Tebo, who is playing one of those possible fathers, Harry Bright. “I think that’s why it thrived.”
Speaking on the telephone from Salt Lake City, where the production’s army of supertroopers are currently encamped, Tebo describes the irresistible effervescence that has made the show such a sunny, relentlessly feel-good piece of escapist entertainment.
“Such a lovely job has been done of creating all these characters full of heart and love, and there’s so much laughter in the show,” he says.
“The creative team have talked about it being like a corked bottle of champagne. Everybody’s got a secret to tell, and everybody’s holding back something that they really want to say.”
That especially goes for Tebo’s character. We’ll steer clear of spoilers here, but if you haven’t guessed what Harry’s big secret is, or if you’ve avoided seeing the movie version (where Harry is played by Colin Firth), your familiarity with the story arcs of big Broadway musicals probably ends at Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Harry, Tebo explains, is “the epitome of an uptight English banker, that stereotype of being very meticulous and buttonedup. He’s coming back to the island to relive his glory days, when he used to be called Harry Headbanger. He was a rocker of some sort, or whatever he thought was a rocker. But now he has a certain hesitant way of life which doesn’t involve backpacking across Europe anymore or wearing ripped jeans and having long grunge hair.”
Inevitably, the siren call of the island, and of course those brain-burrowing songs, result in Harry, alongside most of the cast, donning the 1970s spandex.
“My spandex moment is in the finale when we get to perform Waterloo, which I have to say is one of the most amazing moments in my professional career,” Tebo says. “You really get to feel the essence of ABBA and what their stardom probably felt like when that song came out in 1974. It’s iconic. It’s the song that put them on the map, so it’s kind of a treat that the producers decided to throw it in there at the end. It’s like saying: ‘We know you all came for this song, now here it is.’ ”
As Tebo points out, Waterloo is one of the few numbers that stands outside of the story, without any dramatic pretext for the characters to suddenly sing “My, my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender.”
But surely they missed a trick there. What if, say, the song had opened with Sophie reading a book on Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington in an attempt to soothe her pre-wedding nerves?
Tebo laughs heartily. “Yes, that could have been a scene. And then the show could have never made it through a week on Broadway.”
Shrewdly, the producers didn’t come to me for advice, and the show has lasted on Broadway for over 15 years.
But could this farewell tour really be the end? Says Tebo: “I guarantee you, in five or six years at most, the show will be back on Broadway.”
Théâtre du Rideau Vert is currently offering a different escape from reality, one with plenty of laughs, but with a
much bleaker vision of the human condition.
La Cantatrice chauve and La Leçon (respectively, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson) comprise a double-bill written in the early 1950s from master of absurdist theatre, Eugène Ionesco. The cast of both includes Sylvie Drapeau, Dorothée Berryman and Rémy Girard.
In La Cantatrice chauve, Girard plays a fire chief who, zipping around the city looking for fires to put out, happens upon two interchangeable bourgeois couples trapped in an endless circle of nonsensical platitudes (there is no soprano, bald or otherwise).
In La Leçon, Girard plays an initially timid, increasingly deranged professor unsuccessfully trying to teach his young charge the basics of arithmetic and the rules of his madcap theories of linguistics.
Both plays are maddening, genuinely unhinged and often very funny.