It is hard now to imagine a world in which Mamma Mia! doesn’t exist. The fizzy, frothy musical, which tells the story of a mother, a daughter, and her three possible dads – a classical Shakespearean tale set to disco tunes, as its director Phyllida Lloyd would have it – is almost as much a part of the pop culture landscape as ABBA itself. Since it opened in the West End 25 years ago tomorrow, defying an initial battering from the critics, it’s made over £3 billion, been seen on the stage by more than 65 million people, been performed in more than 50 countries, been turned into a blockbuster film, and introduced generations of people to both the music of ABBA and to the world of musical theatre.
And yet, Mamma Mia! very nearly didn’t exist. In the many painstaking years leading up to 6 April 1999, its all-female creative team – producer Judy Craymer, writer Catherine Johnson, and Lloyd – had to battle a sexist industry, their own relative inexperience, and the intense reluctance of ABBA’s Benny and Björn to get their flared fever dream off the ground. Or, as Craymer puts it, “we kicked our own doors down”.
Craymer was a mid-level production assistant when she first dreamed up the idea of turning ABBA’s songs into a musical in the 1980s. “I wasn’t a big movie producer, I wasn’t somebody offering bags of money – I just had an idea,” she says. When she took that idea to ABBA’s chief songwriters Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, with whom she was working on the musical Chess, “it took a bit of persuading”, she says. “It took a long time.”
The thing was, Ulvaeus thought ABBA was “dead”. By the 80s, his beloved band had become deeply uncool. Sure, their music was still played on the radio every now and again – usually on some channel dedicated to cheesy disco, or in the run-up to Eurovision – but few would dare call themselves a fan. The shiny jumpsuits, the earnest disco songs, the hair – it had all become ripe for mockery, the profound emotions and brilliant melodies forgotten. “ABBA was a bit of a guilty secret,” recalls Lloyd. “Nobody was owning up to how many albums they’d got in the cupboard.” Ulvaeus decided he was no longer a popstar.
But in the 1990s, things started to change. In 1992, Polydor released the greatest hits record ABBA Gold, and it almost immediately topped the charts. Young people who barely remembered ABBA the first time around, and didn’t know they were supposed to be uncool, brought the band out from the shadows. And so Craymer tried again, and this time, it wasn’t a “no.” Even so, she adds, “there was no day when they said, ‘You can do this.’ Right up to the wire, on April the 6th, they were like, ‘OK, this could work.’”
It took Catherine Johnson a little while to see the genius in Craymer’s idea, too. She’d made a name for herself writing plays for the Bush Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic, but by the mid-90s “I had no money”, she recalls. “And I called my agent up and said: ‘I’m absolutely desperate.’” A little while later, he rang her back with two propositions: a writing job on the children’s TV show Byker Grove, and a musical based on the songs of ABBA. She was hugely excited by Byker Grove – her young children were fans. But she thought she may as well take the meeting with Craymer that day too, since she was coming down to London from Bristol anyway. “I was just filling in time really, until I had to go back to the station,” she tells me now.
But the minute she sat down with Craymer, over a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, “it just transformed from being a meeting I thought I had to take to meeting somebody who felt like a best friend immediately, who was so excited and passionate about the project that within a very short time, I felt excited and passionate too.”
It was over that first cheese sandwich that the basic plot formed. “I was a single mother, bringing up two kids,” recalls Johnson. “And at that time, politically, there was a lot of press about reckless single parents, what wasters they were, they were just all trying to get onto a council waiting list… And I wanted to write about a woman who may have been a single parent, but she worked hard – she wanted a good life for her kids. And that’s when the character of Donna started to kind of come alive for me.”
But they couldn’t figure out what the story would be beyond that, and before long, it was time for Johnson to catch her train. They said their goodbyes and stood up to leave. And then, “I had out of nowhere a thought. And I didn’t want to say it out loud, but I also knew if I left that room, I would talk myself out of it. So I just said, ‘What if the daughter wants her dad to come to the wedding, but she doesn’t actually know who her father is? There could be, I don’t know, three possible suspects.’ And Judy just fixed me with a look, and said, ‘Sit back down.’ So that was it. That was the moment Mamma Mia! was born.”
It is a brilliantly ridiculous story. Donna is a no-nonsense, middle-aged B&B owner reliant only on her trusty tool belt, who lives on a Greek island with her 20-year-old daughter Sophie. Sophie is getting married (much to Donna’s dismay), and decides she wants the father she’s never met to walk her down the aisle. The only trouble is she doesn’t know which of three possible men from Donna’s past he is. So she secretly invites all three to the wedding, behind her mother’s back. Disaster and dancefloor numbers ensue.
“There were so many clever things that Catherine did, some of which have gone unrewarded or unnoticed,” says Lloyd. “She used a Shakespearean structure, a classical structure, where you’ve got all these lost souls coming to this island. The whole thing takes place in 24 hours, which is again very classical.”
It wasn’t until Johnson sat down to decide which songs to weave into the plot that she realised what aching, existential lyrics ABBA had smuggled into their pop songs. She read the lyrics for “Slipping Through My Fingers” before she had ever heard the song, and couldn’t believe how poignantly it summed up the joy and regret of parenthood, the strange, sad realisation that you can never truly know your own child: “Each time I think I’m close to knowing/ She keeps on growing/ Slipping through my fingers all the time”. “I thought, ‘This is so perfect. I’ve no idea what it sounds like. Please let it be a beautiful song.’ And I played it for the first time, and thought, ‘Yeah, this is the heart of Mamma Mia!. This is for me what it’s all about: this mother-daughter relationship.”
“What attracted me was it was a woman’s story,” says Craymer. “Björn wrote those lyrics as a kind of stream of female consciousness, really, for Agnetha and Frida to sing.”
When it came to choosing a director, Lloyd was not exactly the obvious choice. She was best known for her work on operas at the Royal Opera House, and when her name first came up in conversation between Craymer and choreographer Anthony Van Laast, she was preparing what would turn out to be a controversial production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the London Coliseum (it featured pole dancing and a female suicide bomber).
But something about Lloyd just made sense to Craymer. “People said, ‘Are you sure Phyllida Lloyd? She does major-scale opera.’ But she just instantly saw the female strength that I was looking for. It wasn’t an intention to have three women [at the helm], but I think it was a power. And it also worked very well with Benny and Björn, because I think they felt very not threatened by us.”
Lloyd hesitated, though, precisely because she was a woman. “Hardly any women had actually done musicals in the West End,” she says. “As the budgets go up, there’s more and more money at stake, and you see less and less women helming shows. And I think it’s that fear of: do we trust a woman with a big purse?”
Soon though, she decided she would do it, and she would do it with all the gusto with which she was currently directing Wagner. “People said to me, ‘How can you do this when you’re doing opera?’ As if this was sort of silly frolics,” she says. “But it wasn’t.” In fact, it had more in common with the Ring Cycle than you might think. “These are two stories about people who don’t know who their parents are. And I’m treating both of them with the same reverence and the same effort and the same energy. And I think we all knew that to make Mamma Mia! work, we had to go at it without any cynicism. We wanted it to be excellent. We wanted it to be really long lasting.”
What followed were several years of honing, developing, and re-writing. When the three women finally flew to Stockholm with the finished text, Ulvaeus and Andersson couldn’t decide if it was good or bad – but they didn’t pull the plug. They thought they’d wait and see the workshops. The workshops came and went, at some point the name changed from Summer Night City to Mamma Mia! (the first choice of name made no sense once they decided it was set on a Greek island), and Ulvaeus and Andersson still weren’t convinced. And that’s how 6 April 1999 rolled around, with ABBA still on the fence, and a couple of hours until curtain.
They weren’t the only sceptical ones. “We were the outsiders,” says Craymer. “Big massive Lion King was about to open, and people thought, ‘Three unknown women helming a musical with ABBA songs? I give it a few months.’”
And yet, from the very first performance at the Prince Edward Theatre, which starred Irish actress Siobhán McCarthy as Donna, it was clear something very special was happening. Ridiculous and riotous, as full of joy as it was full of pathos and peppered with some of the best songs ever written, the show delighted audiences night after night. With its Greek taverna setting, blue-sky backdrop, and glittering jumpsuits, it was also the perfect two-and-a-half-hour escape from the dreary world outside the theatre. This was a story of womanhood, of mothers and daughters, of new love, of lost love, of chosen family, and the crowds loved it. Queues for unclaimed tickets began to form hours before curtain time. The show sold out its 1,650-seat theatre months in advance.
“Most of the musicals that were running at that time were nostalgic,” says Lloyd. “They were historical: there was Phantom of the Opera, there was Les Misérables, there was Miss Saigon – they were all about the past. And this was the audience coming to the show and seeing themselves on stage. Getting a coach to come down from the north of England, and: ‘There I am, on the stage in an ABBA musical.’ It was quite incredible. It was a sort of unstoppable thing.” “It was huge,” says Craymer. “It was like Mardi Gras every night.”
Reviewers, however, were less enamoured. “The creators of Mamma Mia! have basically extended a tired soap opera encounter to more than twice its natural length in a bid to cash in on an extant musical catalogue,” read a typical write-up in Variety.
“The critics were dismissive at best,” says Johnson. “We’re talking, I’m afraid, about male critics. I read stuff that I was incredibly disappointed by and hurt by, and blamed myself for, but there was always: but look at what the audiences are doing! Look at what people you care about are saying! Look at the money that’s coming in! That helped.”
She knows it can sound churlish to claim the critics didn’t “get it”, but in this case, she’s sure they didn’t. “I don’t think they did get what a celebration it was of a particular woman character you don’t see centre stage so much,” she says. “She’s not glamorous, she’s not tragic, she’s just one of us. She’s out there getting on with her life.”
In other words, Mamma Mia! quickly became critic-proof. “When you say that, it sounds like you’re catering to the lowest common denominator,” says Johnson, “and that was never our intention. There is no way Benny and Björn would have let us get away with anything but something that honoured their songs and showed them in a fantastic light. And Phyllida Lloyd is not a director who gets her hands dirty with something that didn’t honour the women, the music, the time.”
When the show made it to Broadway in 2001, it was just as big a success. And it found a particularly fervent fan in Meryl Streep, who took her daughters to see it soon after it opened, just a few weeks after 9/11. “She was trying to deal with her kids and their friends, who were obsessed by what had happened,” says Lloyd. “And they were looking through the papers going, ‘What do we do with these children, to stop them thinking about the horror?’”
The show had such a restorative effect on Streep and her children that she wrote the cast a letter to say thank you. “Of course, we got photocopies of it like schoolgirls,” says Craymer. “She said how much she loved the show, but she also said that to the embarrassment of her children, she wanted to go on to the Mamma Mia! stage. She wanted to know what it was like. And so we always knew in our heads that Meryl liked Mamma Mia!”.
Years later, when they were planning a film adaptation, there was only one person in their minds who could play Donna. And true to her word, Streep said yes. The rest of the cast weren’t hard to get on board after that: Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski: all they needed to hear was “Meryl Streep”, “ABBA” and “Greek island” and they were in. The film’s crew even joked about getting T-shirts made that said: “We were here before Meryl”.
The film, just like the stage musical, was adored by audiences and hated by critics. “I got quite vilified for my work on it,” says Lloyd, who Craymer insisted should direct the film despite never having worked in cinema before. “And elements of it I know were very clunky. Partly that was because I was a rookie. And some of it was the style, that I was chasing Meryl around a Greek island with my handycam – something a bit less polished, which was very much in the spirit of the stage show. It didn’t have that slickness that some other musicals had. It was more rough around the edges, and I wanted the film to feel like that. So yeah, the critics were really sniffy about it. But I think we had the last laugh.” (And as for her directing prowess, Lloyd went on to help Streep to her first Oscar in nearly 30 years, when they collaborated again on Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady in 2011.)
The film was a phenomenal success, not just in the UK but across the world. The whole summer of 2008, at a time when blockbuster musical films were almost unheard of, people were piling into cinemas to see Mamma Mia!.
“Mamma Mia has a huge place in our culture, because the show and the movies speak to a neglected female audience,” says Craymer. “I mean, I would like to think that Greta Gerwig and Barbie are very influenced by Mamma Mia! really – the musical side, the fun side.” It was, you could argue, the original Barbenheimer, given Mamma Mia! was up against Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight at the box office. And just as Barbenheimer was credited with getting people back in cinemas again, “that’s what Mamma Mia! did. It got audiences going all that summer.” Craymer was told the film would be lucky to make $50 million – it ended up making just shy of $700 million.
The genius of Mamma Mia! is that its sun-soaked silliness is wrapped up in real human emotion – helped, of course, by the emotional heft of ABBA’s masterpieces. One minute Donna is doing the splits in the air while singing “Dancing Queen” with her best friends, and the next she is pouring a lifetime of rejection and regret into “The Winner Takes It All”. As Lloyd puts it: “It’s funny until it’s not funny.” If you’ve ever been a parent, or a daughter, or been heartbroken, or been young and in love, or if you’ve had the three possible fathers of your child unexpectedly turn up to the Greek island you’re living on, you will see something of yourself in Mamma Mia!, and you will find comfort in the sheer joy of it.
The show opened the floodgates for a slew of jukebox musicals (though Craymer tells me I mustn’t call it a jukebox musical, and I get a glimpse of how difficult she is to say no to), from We Will Rock You to Jersey Boys, and for women’s stories to be front and centre on the musical stage. Wicked, Six, Legally Blonde: they all followed in Mamma Mia!’s footsteps.
But Johnson doesn’t feel that Mamma Mia! gets the credit it deserves. “This is something that does get me a little bit: I love seeing other female work celebrated on the stage, but I think sometimes it’s overlooked that we did do this 25 years ago,” she says. “And we’ve perhaps paved the way, but we were never really credited with that.”
Craymer agrees. “Culturally and artistically, Mamma Mia! broke every glass ceiling. It smashed down doors.”
‘Mamma Mia!’ is at the Novello Theatre (mamma-mia.com)
