Mamma Mia Here We Go Again Ow
Mamma Mia! Here nosotros go once more — for the last time?
"Cheerio tour" of the feel-proficient, Abba-fuelled Broadway smash returns for a three-day run at Montreal's Place des Arts.
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We may take to face information technology: This time we're through. Possibly.
It seems like the love affair between the long-running Abba musical, Mamma Mia!, and adoring Broadway audiences may be coming to an end, now that it is embarking on what is billed equally its farewell tour (it reaches Place des Arts on Feb. 17 for a three-mean solar day run).
The show still has the banner of its original managing director, Phyllida Lloyd, whose all-female Shakespearean trilogy recently wowed London audiences.
It's non too much of a stretch to indicate out that the plot of Mamma Mia! is pure Shakespearean comedy, too: An exiled ruler (of a crumbling taverna) lives on an exotic Mediterranean island with her only daughter, Sophie, a headstrong young woman who secretly invites three men to her wedding in the belief that one of them is her male parent.
Playwright Catherine Johnson didn't trouble herself with too much psychological subtext, though, and instead of complex soliloquies there are over 20 Abba boom hits (plus i or two pocket-size league ones: Slipping Through My Fingers definitely slipped under my radar). That's enough to make Mamma Mia! one of the most successful musicals of all fourth dimension and arguably the kickoff in a long line of jukebox musicals that have conquered — or infested, depending on your tastes — the West End and Broadway ever since.
First seen in London in 1999 after the producers persuaded songwriters Benny Andersson and
Björn Ulvaeus that their dorsum catalogue could be pure Due west End gold, Mamma Mia! fabricated its Broadway debut soon after 9/11, offer a much needed flare-up of escapist joy.
"There was a lot of darkness and it brought light to the city," says Manhattan-based histrion Andrew Tebo, who is playing one of those possible fathers, Harry Bright. "I think that's why it thrived."
Speaking on the telephone from Salt Lake Metropolis, where the production's army of super-troopers are currently encamped, Tebo describes the irresistible effervescence that has made the show such a sunny, relentlessly feel-skillful slice of escapist entertainment.
"Such a lovely job has been done of creating all these characters full of heart and love, and in that location's so much laughter in the show," he says. "The creative squad take talked about it being like a corked canteen of champagne. Everybody's got a cloak-and-dagger to tell, and everybody's holding dorsum something that they really desire to say."
That specially goes for Tebo'southward graphic symbol. We'll steer clear of spoilers hither, simply if you oasis't guessed what Harry'south big secret is, or if you've avoided seeing the movie version (where Harry is played past Colin Firth), your familiarity with the story arcs of large Broadway musicals probably ends at Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Harry, Tebo explains, is "the epitome of an uptight English language banker, that stereotype of being very meticulous and buttoned-upward. He's coming back to the island to relive his celebrity days, when he used to exist called Harry Headbanger. He was a rocker of some sort, or whatever he thought was a rocker. Simply now he has a certain hesitant style of life which doesn't involve backpacking across Europe anymore or wearing ripped jeans and having long grunge hair."
Inevitably, the siren call of the island, and of class those brain-burrowing songs, result in Harry, alongside nigh of the cast, donning the 1970s spandex.
"My spandex moment is in the finale when we become to perform Waterloo, which I have to say is ane of the most amazing moments in my professional career," Tebo says. "You really go to feel the essence of Abba and what their stardom probably felt like when that song came out in 1974. It's iconic. It's the song that put them on the map, so information technology's kind of a care for that the producers decided to throw it in there at the terminate. It's like saying: 'Nosotros know you all came for this vocal, at present hither it is.'"
As Tebo points out, Waterloo is one of the few numbers that stands outside of the story, without whatever dramatic pretext for the characters to suddenly sing "My, my, at Waterloo Napoleon did give up." But surely they missed a trick at that place. What if, say, the song had opened with Sophie reading a book on Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington in an attempt to soothe her pre-wedding nerves?
Tebo laughs heartily. "Yes, that could have been a scene. Then the show could have never made it through a week on Broadway."
Shrewdly, the producers didn't come to me for advice, and the show has lasted on Broadway for over fifteen years.
But could this farewell tour really exist the terminate? Says Tebo: "I guarantee you lot, in five or six years at near, the bear witness will be back on Broadway."
Mamma Mia! plays February. 17 to 19 at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier, Identify des Arts, 260 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. Tickets $42.75 to $125.75. Call 515-842-2112 or visit placedesarts.com
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Théâtre du Rideau Vert is currently offering a different escape from reality, one with plenty of laughs, just with a much bleaker vision of the man condition.
La Cantatrice chauve and La Leçon (respectively, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson) comprise a double-neb written in the early 1950s from principal of absurdist theatre, Eugène Ionesco. The bandage of both includes Sylvie Drapeau, Dorothée Berryman and Rémy Girard.
In La Cantatrice chauve, Girard plays a fire master who, zipping effectually the city looking for fires to put out, happens upon two interchangeable bourgeois couples trapped in an endless circumvolve of nonsensical platitudes (there is no soprano, baldheaded or otherwise).
In La Leçon, Girard plays an initially timid, increasingly deranged professor unsuccessfully trying to teach his immature charge the basics of arithmetic and the rules of his madcap theories of linguistics.
Both plays are maddening, genuinely unhinged and often very funny.
La Cantatrice chauve and La Leçon play to March 4 at Théâtre du Rideau Vert, 4664 St. Denis St. Tickets: $49; seniors, $44; nether 30, $34.25. Telephone call rideauvert.qc.ca or call 514-844-1793.
Source: https://canoe.com/entertainment/mamma-mia-here-we-go-again-for-the-last-time
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