I have a dream of Mamma Mia 3 — with four new songs from Abba
THE Mamma Mia! musical will lay all its love on doctors, nurses and hospital staff when it reopens in London next year. Judy Craymer, the brains behind the phenomenally successful celebration of the music of Abba, told me she will be inviting ‘NHS and frontline workers to see the show when we get the West End back’.
Craymer, who launched Mamma Mia! 21 years ago, said the production has ‘always been restorative’. It opened on Broadway just weeks after two airliners crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. ‘We were there,’ she said. ‘9/11 struck while we were still in the rehearsal room, just about to move into the theatre. The actors were on their way to rehearsal when the first plane struck.
‘Phyllida Lloyd went from being director to therapist,’ she said, recalling how the company responded to the crisis. ‘They realised that to be doing something to help the city was the right thing.’
A few weeks later an audience was invited to a final dress rehearsal. It was packed. ‘It was a big moment for people,’ Craymer said. ‘That’s the joy of theatre isn’t it? Audiences, a community, everyone feeling an emotion together.’ Meryl Streep took her children to a later performance and, like everyone else, found herself lifted by the Swedish group’s rousing songs.
This new crisis, however, has stopped everything in its tracks — though ‘thank goodness we’ve got two movies to keep people happy’ Craymer said, referring to the 2008 Mamma Mia! film starring Streep, Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Amanda Seyfried and its 2018 sequel Here We Go Again, with Streep joined by Lily James and Cher, which will be released on Netflix from June 26.
During lockdown, Craymer said she had planned to give some thought to Mamma Mia! The Movie 3. And although she has managed to avoid the virus, she has found it hard to focus. ‘I was meant to have been getting on with that, in my head, during these months. But then I got hit with Covid fog,’ she told me, from her country home in Warwickshire. ‘I think one day there will be another film, because there’s meant to be a trilogy, you see.
‘I know Universal would like me to do it,’ she added, saying she wanted to use the four new Abba numbers Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus have written for the virtual concert they’ve planned with Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.
As we chatted, Craymer wondered whether Here We Go Again could make a stage musical. ‘It’s a thought,’ she conceded. However, she understands all too well the peril the theatre industry’s in, with playhouses threatened with closure and thousands of creatives, many of them freelances, struggling to make ends meet. While acknowledging that the Government has a lot of other things on its plate, she believes it must come to the aid of the subsidised and provincial theatres. ‘They’re the ones that need help,’ she said, noting that the stars of her shows and films cut their teeth in places like the National, Donmar, royal Court, Almeida, Bush and Kiln. ‘They must be saved,’ she said emphatically.
Craymer agreed with Sam Mendes who proposed, in the Financial Times, that the UK Government could act as a ‘theatre angel’ and invest in productions, to the benefit of all. She pointed out that if the UK Government had invested in Les Miserables when it first opened ‘that’s a very nice investment to have had’.
‘I think the Government should help,’ she said. ‘It’s a massive economy, the theatre. You can’t say London is open without the theatres being open.’
The West End’s return is likely to begin early next year, by which time stringent health and safety protocols will be in place, and problems with social distancing (hopefully) sorted.
‘It’s going to take a couple of million to put Mamma Mia! back on,’ said Craymer. ‘People think you give the set a dust, and off you go.’ But those sets will have to be tested, the cast re-rehearsed and the show marketed. ‘You’ve got to tell people when they can come,’ she added.
When we reach that point, it’s vital the Government get behind the reopening, she says. ‘When we’re back, Boris must come to the theatre. The royals must come. It’s such an important part of people coming together — as much as we enjoy sitting at home watching a Netflix boxset.
‘Theatre is the heartbeat of London and the entire country.’