(Also, the Broadway performers sang a lot better.) The movie was fun, in its way, but it was also an uneasy fusion of rapture and camp that clunked.īut now that there’s a “Mamma Mia!” sequel, it can be said with certainty that the ABBA musical is a form unto itself - a shamelessly innocent (or maybe just shameless) scrapbook pieced together out of the world’s most sublime ear candy, a story that sprawls in four directions at once (each subplot seems crafted by a different cookie cutter), an overdose of clowning by middle-aged actors who’ve been encouraged to take a fearless pride in what raffish physical specimens they’ve become, all held together by the transcendent classiness of Meryl Streep. demonstrating, in every line, what stick figures they were playing. Yet it actually worked less well with major actors - Streep, Brosnan, etc. True confession: I’m a religious nut about ABBA, one who saw the Broadway production of “Mamma Mia!” three times, but I didn’t love the movie version of “Mamma Mia!” The cheeseball plot, which was like “Gilligan’s Island” recast as a romcom, was never designed to be anything but a delivery system for the incandescence of ABBA’s music. Standing there in her go-go space boots, joined by fellow Donna and the Dynamos members Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn) and Rosie (Alexa Davies), she tears into “When I Kissed the Teacher” like a tiger, and though it’s a less-than-great ABBA song, the staging is more dynamic than anything in the first “Mamma Mia!” The number has propulsion and flair, which makes you hope that the film will be a sustained lyrical experience - not just a semi-irresistible pastiche but an honest-to-God musical to remember. Lily James transcends all that sloshed-emoting-at-the wedding tomfoolery. Then, of course, there was Pierce Brosnan, who sang “S.O.S.” sounding like a seal with a ping-pong ball stuck in his mouth.
Some belted, some crooned, some warbled, and even the great Streep kept declaiming the lyrics as if she thought every line of singing was supposed to be a line of acting.
#MAMMA MIA READING HIGH SCHOOL FREE#
Ten years ago, in “Mamma Mia!,” most of the actors approached singing ABBA songs as if they’d been given a free pass on karaoke night. She comes onstage to deliver a graduation speech, and instead tugs the gown off her shoulders to do an unexpectedly fiery rendition of “When I Kissed the Teacher.” It’s 1979, and Donna, the free-spirited expatriate-on-a-Greek-island innkeeper played by Meryl Streep, is now played, at the end of her Oxford undergraduate days, by Lily James, in honey-gold ringlets, with a smile that could light up several city blocks.
Purchase tickets: (952) 401-5898 or Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” the perfectly titled sequel to “Mamma Mia!” (it opens 10 years to the week after the first film), kicks off on a bubbly high.
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