Universal’s ‘Mamma Mia!’ is this summer’s feel-good hit musical – 4 stars ****

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 6/28/08 – Soon after the stage musical ‘Mamma Mia!’ opened in London in 1999, Tom Hanks expressed interest in making it into a film. “By the twelfth minute, I was standing up singing along with the music,” says executive producer Tom Hanks. It would take nine years to bring to the screen.

“The songs are timeless,” says Meryl Streep who’s cast in the lead role as the mother of the bride. “I was told that I was going to climb up the goat house wall while singing ‘Mamma Mia.’ I thought, ‘How big could a goat house be?’ The goat house turned out to be this sheer wall. I was basically doing a ‘Spider-Man’ stunt. I got in shape really quickly.”

The premise of ‘Mamma Mia!’ is that a young woman living in Greece wants to be given away at her wedding by her father. The problem is, her mother has never said who her father is. Determined to find out which one is her father, Sophie secretly invites her mother’s three long-lost lovers to the wedding.

“Finding Sophie was a huge task,” says Craymer. “She had to be impish, but innocent at the same time. She had to be fun, and she needed to sing really well, of course. Amanda ticked every box; she is our ideal Sophie.”

Amanda Seyfried is definitely impish and performs stunning vocals as Sophie. Known as “weather girl” Karen in ‘Mean Girls’ and as Sarah in HBO’s ‘Big Love’, Seyfried describes being chosen for the role of Sophie as “every girl’s dream.”

“Amanda has that completely winning, radiant warmth and an almost childlike youthfulness,” says director Phyllida Lloyd. “She also has a fabulously natural voice that made Benny and Björn ask her to sing tracks she wasn’t even singing in this film. She walked in and, from the first note she sang, you could feel everybody in the room go, ‘This is it.’”

The development of ‘Mamma Mia!’ began in the ’80s when producer Judy Craymer was working with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus as executive producer of their first post-ABBA project, ‘Chess’.

“These were the men who had written ‘Dancing Queen,’ one of the greatest pop songs of all time,” says Craymer. Inspired by the theatricality of their songs, she wanted to create an original musical that would use existing ABBA songs. Initially reluctant, Andersson and Ulvaeus eventually consented. Playwright Catherine Johnson was brought in to conceive the story.

“I think that the biggest surprise for people who go to see it is that whatever they think it is before they go, they come out with a totally different experience,” says Ulvaeus. “The songs are good, but the context in this intelligent, witty way that they put together the old lyrics and used them to bring the story forward was amazing. I’m Catherine Johnson’s biggest fan.”

The wining story is the huge success of ‘Mamma Mia!’. Even if you don’t care about ABBA, you love the musical because the story is so endearing. More than 30 million people have seen the stage show worldwide and purchased $2 billion in tickets.

Casting the candidate fathers correctly is crucial to making the story work. They need to be equally tremendously likable. But in different ways, so that Sophie is unable to form a preference for which man she hopes is actually her father. Cast to play the dads are Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård.

“We’ve got three men with incredible warmth and humor, and an intrinsic understanding of what ‘Mamma Mia!’ is and what it requires,” says Lloyd. “Each of these actors has the skill to take us on this incredible journey from a place in their lives where they’re all a bit stuck, a bit lost, to their liberation and literally letting their hair down on a magical island.”

Cast together with Meryl Streep as the singing group ‘The Dynamos’ are British star Julie Walters and Tony Award-winning actress Christine Baranski. “What holds this together so well is this marvelous story about deep relationships,” says Baranski. “One of the great challenges and pleasures for me, and Meryl and Julie, was creating this sense of an old and textured friendship. It was easy to connect to Meryl and Julie. They are both awesome women.”

Great relationships. Great songs. Great acting. Great fun. Beautiful Greek islands. If you want to feel happy, see ‘Mamma Mia!’

‘Momma Mia!’
Release Date: July 18th, 2008 (USA)
Rating: PG-13 for some sex-related comments
Length: 109 minutes
Distributor: Universal Pictures