Laying All My Love on Mamma Mia—

“You sound just like your mother,” someone tells Sophie. The production creates an instant parallel between mother and daughter, Donna and Sophie, aligning visual aspects of the two characters via similar hairstyles and costume color schemes (initially light and dark blues) as well as personality traits such as questionable romantic endeavors and attachments to loveable sidekicks/best friends (both mother and daughter even share secret dances with their respective hilarious buddies). It’s by way of these initial clues that the generational jive begins—and what a genuinely funny, heartwarming, and worthwhile jive it is—

While Donna and Sophie mirror one another on various levels, so too do Donna’s former love interests, the three men Sophie has invited to her wedding in hopes that one will clearly be her biological father. Harry, Sam, and Bill may each have different accents (one Australian, one English, one unidentifiable), but initially their costumes are all varying shades of white, khaki, and brown—this is until Sophie’s wedding day in which she and fiancé Sky match and Sam and Donna both end up in black for “The Winner Takes It All,” altering the mother-daughter similarities that are woven throughout the piece and symbolizing the break in the fabulously glitzy mother-daughter tango, the ode to female independence, as each lead female opts for some form of male partnership.

Donna, the principal member of the “first girl power band,” is referred to as “an icon of female independence”—a description that follows her and defines her throughout much of the musical. Not only do we learn that she raised Sophie alone, but she runs a hotel by herself and is seen throughout much of the first half of the production in overalls, operating phallic power tools. Her best friend Tanya often references her own three failed marriages; Donna’s friends remind her of their old mantra—“Marriage is an institution for people that belong in an institution.” But Donna’s views change upon interactions with Sam Carmichael, her former lover, and then the audience not only sees Donna as more feminine in appearance but in a vulnerable light—the hotel to which she’s devoted her life was based on one of Sam’s architectural designs. And so, on the Greek Isle, Aphrodite works her magic.

The role of place is constantly central to the play—the main characters are from English-speaking nations but the piece takes place on Greece at the hotel Donna owns. Greek characters appear as chorus members, wearing traditional attire and performing day-to-day activities. Greeks aren’t in the center of the action, leaving the “other,” the westerner, central to the events that take place at a hotel, a place for “others.” Furthermore, the production deals with the task of adapting that which is British to that which is “other” (“other” referring to both Greece, the setting of the play, and “other” in terms of differentiation from the production itself as might be seen in other nations, namely the U.S.A.). London’s performance incorporates bagpipe playing, titles a canoe prop “Waterloo,” and then weaves traditional Greek tunes into the reprise of “I Have A Dream.”

Overall, the production was an artfully woven, high-energy powerhouse that left me belting ABBA songs for days—so Mamma Mia, Thank YOU for the Music! This musical was AMAZING.

Andrea Morrison

UC San Diego

amorriso@ucsd.edu