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Mamma Mia! is far from a favorite of mine, and I frankly
found the Broadway show decidedly underwhelming. The original ABBA songs
are largely insubstantial ‘70s pop candy, and the story is not
terribly interesting, but one of the camp directors and his wife were
head-over-heels enamored with this show. Somehow this became the epitome of
the descriptive “up-beat and fun,” which was repeated to me
over and over again every time I suggested a title which was not this or
Rodgers and Hammerstein and therefore not “up-beat and fun” (I don’t
know that The Sound of Music is
“up-beat and fun,” but I digress…) Given the oft-repeated
suggestion that I find “something like Mamma Mia!” instead of whatever it was I wanted to do, I
figured I might as well go the full nine and just do Mamma Mia! itself.
While it may not
have been the best, Mamma Mia! was
certainly the most successful of the genre reflecting a relatively recent
and short-lived trend in musicals: cobbling together a series of songs from
a particular pop/rock artist to form a thin, basic narrative, and thereby
exploit the audience’s sense of nostalgia or partiality to that
artist, or both, to make a quick buck on Broadway. It’s not a
terrible idea in itself, artistically speaking, and some of them were
briefly very popular, although many of them have failed and most of them
closed in short order. I’m waiting for someone to try this with
Springsteen.
I actually tried
it myself a long time ago while I was in college, taking the story of The Jazz Singer (from the 1980 film
with Neil Diamond), making the main character an Italian chef instead of a
rabbi, and using Billy Joel songs (including obscure gems like
“You’re My Home,” “Temptation” and
“Souvenir”) to tell the story. The play was called Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. I
probably still have the script on an old floppy disk somewhere, in WordStar
format. (Just in case you’re wondering, I saw Movin’ Out when it was in previews. I didn’t really
like it, but only because it was not really a musical; it was a dance show with a cover band.) I have often
thought about digging Scenes…
up and revising it for camp, but when I mentioned it during the time I was
planning for 2005, someone said an incredibly ignorant thing:
“The kids hate Billy Joel.” To which I had to reply, “And
you think they love ABBA?!?!”
Fortunately, Mamma Mia! wasn’t much of a
challenge in terms of acquiring the materials I needed to put it together.
The songbook contains all of the songs from the show (albeit out of order),
which are very easy to learn and play, and I was able to get the script
from an internet source I discovered a couple of years earlier. The story
is thin as it is, so I was not likely to lose much by trimming it down to
an hour, but the problem was that the songs are largely incidental and
don’t really carry the narrative, so I had to have a bit more spoken
dialogue in this show than I really would have liked so the audience could
follow the plot. (I’ve often wondered why no one ever objected to the
parentage and promiscuity aspects of the main story, since other proposed
titles have been rejected based on similarly “inappropriate”
elements…)
The new Pontiac
Playhouse was in much better shape for this show than it was for The Simpsons,
but we were still forbidden to paint on the stage, making it somewhat
difficult to create a backdrop. The original show has a curved structure
representing the walls of the courtyard in which most of the action takes
place; what I did here was cover the face of the protruding upstage
structure with white roll paper and paint that to resemble the Broadway set
(the Playbill, thankfully, had a picture of it). I covered the upper part
of the back wall with sky-blue fabric and painted that with white and blue
streaks to resemble a cyclorama sky. Tables and chairs strategically placed
on stage, with flower vases and other accessories, completed the tableau.
It was actually a decent-looking set.
We discovered,
though, that the dimensions of that upstage enclosure were going to be
problematic. While the lower-camp cast of The Simpsons was able to pass through it with little
difficulty, the older kids found that it was too narrow and too low for
anyone to move about inside, and the center-stage opening required anyone
who entered or exited through it to duck.
(There were other issues with it as well, as we later discovered on Wicked.) It
was also here that I noticed just how low the ceiling above the stage was;
only 11 feet, far and away the
lowest I’d ever seen.
We had a very
good cast on Mamma Mia!; I
considered taking the subbies out of auditions to make it strictly a
middle-camp show but found that we needed the talent. Annette Covrigaru, who had been in several shows but never had
a lead, really impressed us with her audition and we cast her as Donna (it
didn’t hurt that she bore a striking resemblance to Carolee Carmello,
who played Donna when I saw it on Broadway). Brittany Grimaldi had always
had a great voice and was perfect for the part of Sophie. Brooke Schwartz
and Nina Carlin, juniors now, were terrific as Donna’s friends Rosie
and Tanya, while inters Sydney Spal and Tory Segall played Sophie’s
friends Ali and Lisa.
There was very
little interest in Mamma Mia! on
the boys’ side, as I had feared, and very few boys auditioned (there
were, in fact, no junior boys in
this show, the first and only time I ever got zero participation from any
division in camp). Subbies Josh Housman, a very good singer and mature
performer, and Eric Thurm, an excellent comic character actor, played Sam
and Harry, two of Sophie’s potential dads; the third, Bill, was
played by the much younger Jacob Mann. Jake Granoff, who had been so good
in The Little
Mermaid and Really Rosie, played Sophie’s fiancé Sky.
Graham Winston, who had also been in Really
Rosie as a sophomore, got the role of Pepper, while Grayson Pollock
provided some comic moments as the Minister. Subbie Phil Haines returned to
the stage as Eddie.
As neither Jenny
nor I had any ability to choreograph dance numbers, dance director Mandy
Scoffield and dance counselor Robin Brown graciously donated their time to
help us out on all three shows, particularly this one,
and the results were outstanding. We couldn’t have done it without
them.
Like
2002’s Grease,
Mamma Mia! was a very good show
despite the somewhat limited, unchallenging material, and the cast had a
lot of fun with it.
_____
Pontiac
Players present
MAMMA MIA!
Music and
Lyrics by BENNY ANDERSSON, STIG ANDERSSON and BJÖRN ULVAEUS
Book by
CATHERINE JOHNSON
Principal
Cast
ANNETTE
COVRIGARU as Donna
BRITTANY
GRIMALDI as Sophie
JOSH HOUSMAN
as Sam
ERIC THURM as
Harry
JACOB MANN as
Bill
NINA CARLIN as
Tanya
BROOKE
SCHWARTZ as Rosie
JAKE GRANOFF
as Sky
SYDNEY SPAL as
Ali
TORY SEGALL as
Lisa
GRAHAM WINSTON
as Pepper
PHIL HAINES as
Eddie
GRAYSON
POLLOCK as Minister
Directed by
JAY BRAIMAN and JENNY BALES
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