ABBA Dabba Doo

I’m the kind of person who marches to the beat of a different trampoline. So it may be no great surprise that I did not see The Hunger Games this weekend.

I have nothing against The Hunger Games, per se, but we were celebrating a family birthday and did not wish to spend even one moment in dystopia. And so, we did the most non-dystopian thing we could think of – we headed out to see the touring Broadway production of Mamma Mia!

Now if you would have told me some 30-plus years ago that I would one day spend nearly 3 hours voluntarily listening to ABBA songs… and enjoying them, I would have said that you were smoking banana peels (or whatever my hard rockin’, geeky 13-year-old brain could have come up with on the fly). Back then, I had both feet firmly planted in the KISS camp.

Oh, what tunes! What hair! What Spandex! And you can bet your face paint that I was the proud owner of every single KISS 8-track. That’s right – 8-track. I am that old. If you don’t know what an 8-track is, go ask your mother… or your grandmother. For those of you who do know, let’s just say that to this day I cannot listen to Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice” without my mind hearing the fade-out and Ka-THUNK of it changing from track 1 to track 2, then Lou Gramm’s fade-in of “You know that you are”.

Good times… Good times.

Anyway, back to Mamma Mia! Did you know that producer Judy Craymer actually had the idea of weaving ABBA hits into a story over 25 years ago? Well, she approached Benny and Björn (the two B’s in ABBA) to convince them that it was a smashing good idea. Let’s just say, they were less than thrilled. But Judy had BUMBLE (see The Sting of Rejection, March 14). She found a writer to create the story – Catherine Johnson. Then a director – Phyllida Loyde. The rest is Super Trouper history!

Don’t you just love the creativity involved in making a musical sensation out of a band’s hit list? I sure do.

You know, when the play first opened in April of 1999, one British critic wrote, “Mamma Mia! could put Prozac out of business!”

I love that even more.

PROMPT: You can try the Mamma Mia! method right there in your own home! Take your favorite band or artist and create a story that fits their hits. From country to hip hop -- any wordy musical genre will do, so create away! I don’t know who you’ll pick, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be working with “Rock and Roll all Nite” (yep, we didn’t have spell-check back then either),  “Love Gun”, “Beth”…