I have a dream… Whose dream was it to bring Mamma Mia! to life? Well, it certainly wasn’t Benny and Björn’s, the two men behind the music of ABBA. In 1982 they had made the decision to not continue with the band and had started turning their heads towards writing a musical with Tim Rice, the lyricist for JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and EVITA. Enter the leading lady in this story, Judy Cramer. She had begun working with Tim Rice as his production assistant and was working through a lot of the major tasks on bringing CHESS, a musical he was writing with Benny and Björn and because they were all spending a great deal of their working existence around each other she started to immerse herself in the music of ABBA, becoming obsessed with their catalogue. She started talking to Björn directly, saying; “I think that there’s a story to be told from the lyrics of ‘The Winner Takes It All’. I’d already dissected the ABBA songs and I knew that ‘Honey, Honey’ or ‘Take A Chance On Me’ could be funny even though they weren’t written as comedy song. But, I would never have wanted to write the show myself. It’s all part of my love of steering something from behind the scenes. I worked with a number of writers on different ideas but they were never quite right, and Björn knew they weren’t right” says Judy Cramer. Judy settled on a writer, who had mostly done TV writing, Catherine Johnson and so they started piecing together a show with the working title ‘Summer Night City’. Through the process, songs like ‘Fernando’, ‘Rock Me’ ‘I Wonder’ and an unreleased ABBA track, ‘Just Like That’ were all in the mix of titles of songs to be used. But, as things go in theatre they were all let go. Eventually it came to light that the title should be Mamma Mia! In fact, ‘Summer Night City’ stayed as the opening number all through the workshops and into the 3rd preview in London, before being chopped! Now with the show hurtling towards the London stage the creative team had developed it’s own creative team of Dynamos in Judy Cramer (producer), Catherine Johnson (writer) and Phyllida Lloyd (director). Was it a purposeful decision or was it a joyful accident? “I am delighted that MAMMA MIA!’s success was the result of an unprecedented collaboration of three women, but there was no discrimination of men intended.”, Cramer says. There is a wonderful symmetry that the onstage relationships of three best friends - Donna and the Dynamos - replicates the women behind the creation of the show. “We all see ourselves as those three women on the stage, because Catherine is the slightly chaotic single mom, I’m the high-maintenance one, and the pragmatic one is Phyllida.” The London production opened at the Prince Edward Theatre on April 6, 1999 and transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre in 2004 and then to the Novello Theatre in 2012 where it is still playing 20 years on. The Australian production was the third production to open worldwide, on June 9, 2001, at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre. Anne Wood starred as Donna Sheridan, with Rhonda Burchmore as Tanya, Lara Mulcahy as Rosie, Natalie O’Donnell as Sophie, Nicholas Eadie as Sam, Robert Grubb as Harry, and Peter Hardy as Bill. The first Australian tour lasted for four and a half years, with Silvie Paladino, Kellie Rode, Sun Park, David Harris, Simon Gleason, Esther Hannaford, and Bobby Fox appearing as replacement cast members. A 10th-anniversary production began in 2010, with many of the original cast returning to their roles again. A brandnew production has since played two seasons across Australia, with the first one starring the original Sophie Sheridan, Natalie O’Donnell, as Donna Sheridan, and then a second tour starring Elise McCann. The show makes no apologies for embracing the world of pop music and fusing it with the medium of musical theatre. If you think back to the 1930s and 1940s, the popular music of that time came from the world of musicals — both Broadway and Hollywood movie musicals. Through the coming decades, pop music became its own entity, and the two mediums separated. MAMMA MIA! attempts to bridge that gap once again; it reintroduces the The world’s most loved musical
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