Mamma Mia! It's pop happiness

The musical is a treat for Abba fans, even if the characters say vacuous things about love, life, and identity

Chowdaiah saw full-house shows of Mamma Mia! on Friday and Saturday, and with good reason. The musical, produced by Varalakshmi Sharathkumar, had everything you’d want for a pleasant weekend outing: music, dance, and some completely harmless drama.

The best part of the show, of course, was the music of the Swedish pop group Abba. The actors from Chennai sang their hit songs, superbly live, to the accompaniment of karaoke tracks. And then there was energetic, synchronised dancing of the sort we see only in the movies.

The musical, directed by Mithran Devanesan and choreographed by Jeffery Vardon of Chennai’s Hot Shoe Dance Company, tells an unbelievably cheerful story in which an island full of people drink from the fount of love and find mates after an hour of meandering exchanges. Mamma Mia! is a slickly produced pop fairy tale.

It must take a lot of time, money and effort to put something together on this scale, and all credit to the artistes, the producers, and the sponsors (Seagrams 100 Pipers) for making it possible.

For those of us in college in the 1980s, Abba and Boney M presented an easily accessible window to Western pop. We heard their songs on LPs with their wonderful, warm analog sound, and liked them instantly. Abba's music is agreeable even to ears tuned only to Indian songs, which is probably why many of their numbers were plagiarised by Indian movie music composers (The otherwise original R D Burman borrowed Mamma Mia! for Mil gaya humko saathi in Hum Kisise Kum Nahin).

Mamma Mia! was first made as a musical in 1999, and then turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan in 2008. It has been performed on stage by franchise holders in many countries. The movie was a top grosser, and even beat Titanic in the UK.

Sophie, about to get married, opens her mother Donna’s diary and finds that she has had flings with three men. She is curious to know which of them is her father, and invites all of them over to the wedding, without Donna's knowledge. The Greek island where Sophie and Donna live thus becomes the locale for friendly and very superficial exchanges about love, life, and identity.

Egged on by volunteers, many in the audience at Chowdaiah grooved in the aisles to Dancing queen, Money money money and a couple of other Abba numbers. Many teens from the '80s had brought their children along, and were humming along (I saw some with print-outs of the lyrics).

For me, the play took away some of the mystique of the lyrics, making them a bit literal (somewhat like what happened when Ramanand Sagar made a TV Ramayana). But overall, Mamma Mia! was a fizzily produced evening of pop nostalgia, where Vijay Mallya-style tastes met Prabhudeva-style dance floor energy. This isn’t Fiddler on the Roof, or gut-wrenching drama of any kind, but you might still like the glitz and the colour.