Cast take a chance on Abba-fuelled production
Show delivers stompin’ good time for all
Forty years after Abba shut up shop as a working band, their music is still more catchy than Omicron and Hamilton Musical Theatre’s production of Mamma Mia! is the proof.
Credit to HMT for having the guts to put on a live performance at a time when so many public events have bitten the Covid dust.
Everyone in the auditorium had to be vax-certed and face-masked, but, those inconveniences aside, HMT’S production of Mamma Mia! is intoxicating right through to the endof-show romp where the cast belts out a bunch of Abba’s tunes to the delight of the audience.
Directed by John Drummond, the cast is big but Riverlea is not big. So congratulations to all the people who made the whole thing work, including the musical direction, clever sets and rigorous choreography.
Based on a book by Catherine Johnson and preceded by a movie adaptation, the stage show centres on Sophie who is living with her mum Donna at their taverna on a scenic Greek island.
Sophie is about to marry her sweetheart Sky, something her mother neglected to do back in the days of free love and as a result Sophie doesn’t know who her dad is, and really wants to.
Following the trail of “dot-dot-dots” in her mother’s dairy, from 21 years earlier, she invites three potential fathers to the nuptials — a sure-fire recipe for chaos.
This wends its way to a grand
finale where everyone ends up with someone and lives happily ever after. It’s a great big feel-good.
The lead role of Sophie is played by Bethany Petrovich and it’s her wedding, and her quest to find her father that forms the basis of the whole tale.
A sunny blonde, Petrovich clearly has a stompin’ good time and her performance really lifts the show.
And if the players are having fun it comes across. Clammy face patches or no, there was no disguising the enthusiasm in the audience.
But she is not alone, big shout-outs to co-principals Fiona Greaves, who plays Sophie’s mum Donna, Annemarie
Case-miller as Tanya and Heather Connolly as Rosie — Donna’s ditzy friends from their youth — and the possible dads, Lindsay Amner as Sam, Jonathan Kay as Harry and Mike Scanlon playing Bill.
Through the show is threaded Abba’s compelling music, despite being Swedish and singing in English as a second language, Abba spent a decade as one of the most popular musical groups in the world and anyone with the ears will pick the classical influences in the work of Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus.
The result of collaboration by a mid-north Island theatre consortium, Hamilton Musical Theatre’s production of Mamma Mia! is directed by John Drummond with choreography by Vicki Loynes, musical direction by Jonathan Hawthorn and production by Maureen Cruickshank,