Why Mamma Mia! is Abba-solutely fabulous

If you were going to write a musical about a band, which band would you choose?

My get-rich-quick scheme would be to do a West End show based on the songs of Slade.

You remember Slade. Those cheerful, Black Country lads with nine-inch platforms led by Noddy Holder who had a voice like a rusty cheese grater. Surely it would work. Plenty of hits, likeable chaps, lashings of Seventies flavour. How could you go wrong?

I mentioned my brilliant scheme to the playwright Catherine Johnson. “I love Slade, too,” she said. “Saw them in the Seventies. Great band, but for a musical there’s not enough variety. Not enough quiet songs. You need a few reflective ones. Slade didn’t do reflective.”

Mind you, this is from the woman who says she would one day like to stage a musical about The Wurzels – the ooh-ah Scrumpy and Western band she loved in her youth.

Miss Johnson does, however, know a thing or two about bands and fans. Ten years ago, she wrote Shang-a-Lang, about three mature women from Chipping Sodbury who go mental in a holiday camp where their girlhood idols, the Bay City Rollers, are playing.

I remember enjoying it a lot except for one thing. You couldn’t escape the fact that the Rollers’ songs were a load of tartan tripe. It was hard to forgive the cast for worshipping them.

But, then, Johnson’s very next show was Mamma Mia! It hit the jackpot, to put it mildly. The Abba compilation show has been one of the great cash cows of theatre history. ITV1 is screening a documentary, The Mamma Mia! Story, about it on July 3.

The statistics are mind-bending. Mamma Mia! has been seen by 30 million people worldwide since it opened nine years ago. There are currently 18 productions in 10 countries. It has taken more than £1billion – and is bringing in around £4million a week.

That’s an awful lot of money, money, money. That sort of scale has only been associated with Cameron Mackintosh or Andrew Lloyd Webber.

This show, culled straight from the Abba songbook, has made its producer Judy Craymer one of the UK’s richest women.

Despite her connection with this gold mine, astonishingly Catherine Johnson has a mortgage on her new house in Bristol and is still writing for local theatre groups – having always supported the theatre fringe in her native west country.

Yet she couldn’t have dreamed of what the Abba show would do to her career. A global stage smash, Mamma Mia! is now also a film to be released here on July 1.

Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, are executive producers, along with Abba songwriters Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus – both of whom have cameo roles in the film.

The stage show was made by British girl power and that’s the way Judy Craymer has kept the movie. Johnson has written the screenplay and the show’s original director Phyllida Lloyd has filmed it, despite never having made a movie before.

Johnson was as astonished as anyone by the show’s success – indeed, she told me she was delighted when it notched up three months in the West End. “No one would accuse it of being deeply cerebral. It’s not a starry show either. As plays go, it’s not uncomfortable, angry, shameful or edgy. It’s just fun and it makes an audience relax.”

But it’s the casting of musical novices which is pure genius. Meryl Streep, who is playing the mum Donna, is a superb actress but I can’t wait to see her singing in a purple Spandex suit.

She is supported by the handsome, wash-and-go Pierce Brosnan. James Bond groovin’ to SOS! Who is not going to want to see that? Colin Firth and Julie Walters co-star and rumour has it that Colin Firth’s dancing is a massive crime against humanity – another great reason to go and see the film.

Fans of the stage show need to know that the film doesn’t completely adhere to the original. There are a couple of minor transgressions.

Under Attack, which opens Act II in the theatre has gone and Knowing Me, Knowing You – a copper-bottomed classic I’d have thought – has been bizarrely substituted by When All Is Said And Done. Also, you only get to hear Thank You For the Music in the closing credits. There is a nagging worry that it might have been Americanised but that remains to be seen.

I do hope they have stuck closely to the story. What I loved about Mamma Mia! was the surprise of the thing. Instead of a turgid, Stockholm-based backstage drama about the band members, the show turned out to be a Greek island rom-com with almost nothing to do with the Swedish supergroup. The cocktail is irresistible. A paradise island, a father and daughter reunion and a wistful return to the Seventies via the musical time portal known as Abba.

If it were a mere Abba singalong I don’t think it would have lasted as well as it has. The story has characters you actually care about. That, I think, is the magic ingredient – more than the songs.

People like me love it and I absolutely hated Abba as a student in the Seventies. I thought they were disco fodder for office temps. Catherine Johnson says that even she didn’t like them much. She was into the Sex Pistols. How ironic that the Pistols now seem like a horrible racket, whereas Abba’s stuff gets better and better.

Their songs have improved almost magically. Perhaps we middle-aged love the show because Abba’s work has just enough pain (the band went through two divorces) to appeal to all those who have come an emotional cropper. Into every life a little rain must fall and Mamma Mia! acknowledges this without ever being depressing.

Also, we know and love the songs because they are always being played. It’s the kind of music you can shimmy about to (bad back permitting) at weddings and parties while mouthing the words.

“See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing Queen.” Abba are nothing if not reliable. Yet while this show is shouting, “Take a chance on me,” films have a habit of wrecking the stage production they’re based on.

The movie version of The Pro­ducers was terrible. The Phantom Of The Opera film was a washout and I wasn’t sure about Evita. In recent times, only Chicago has really come up trumps on celluloid.

The one thing I have against the show is that it is to blame for a lot of carbon copies – such as the late and unlamented Tonight’s The Night, a Rod Stewart horror.

I will never understand why the migraine-inducing and witless Queen musical We Will Rock You is such a box-office triumph. But people seem to love it.

Other compilation shows are more deserving and yet much shorter lived. I would love to think current reggae musical The Harder They Come may be a long-term winner but I am not banking on it. Jersey Boys looks like a stayer but will British audiences really take it to heart in years to come?

For those trying to write original musicals, it must be depressing that compilation shows are so popular. But they are often more fun than new shows. Lord Of The Rings and Gone With The Wind failed because the shows are so long and the songs so dreary.

No, the more I think of it, juke-box shows are the future. And, as I said, Slade The Musical is waiting to happen, despite Catherine John­son’s warning that it won’t work.

All I need is a producer, a plot line and Daniel Day-Lewis to play Noddy Holder. Mamma Mia! move over.