The Inception of Mamma Mia! (2008)

Mamma Mia! movie poster

I grew up watching the movie Mamma Mia!. The movie came out when I was two, and I have seen it just about every year since then. The first time I ever watched the movie was with my mom when I was a toddler, because she also really loves this movie. However, my earliest memories of this movie are not fond ones. I was originally a big hater and really didn’t want to watch it! But as I got older, my opinion did a total 180. It’s really hard to not like this movie, in my opinion, or at least stick to your guns about not liking it. Who doesn’t want to watch Meryl Streep sing ABBA songs on a gorgeous Greek island? In total, I’ve seen Mamma Mia easily over a dozen times over the course of my life. I can almost completely recite the movie from memory at this point, and it’s a challenge for me to not mouth lines of dialogue back at the screen when I’m watching it.

Mamma Mia! is a jukebox musical, and I think that whoever thought of the idea of a jukebox musical. Smushing a portion of an artists music catalog into one discernible story to be acted out, is a genius. Mamma Mia! in particular follows a narrative woven together from the songs of best-selling Swedish pop disco group ABBA. The inception of this idea for an ABBA jukebox musical came officially in 1983, just a year after the band broke up, when the stage musical’s producer Judy Craymer met two of ABBA’s founding members, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, while they were working with Time Rice on the musical Chess. The other two founding member of ABBA are two women named Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

In a featured article entitled ‘Mamma Mia! A Totally Original Musical,’ that originally came out in 2005, but is now featured on the musical’s website, Craymer revealed that the song that inspired her idea to make a musical out of ABBA songs was the song The Winner Takes It All. Knowing that this song was the reason we have this incredible musical today makes so. Much. Sense. But I will get back to that. It is reported that Andersson and Ulvaeus were both initially ‘unenthusiastic’ to the idea of the musical, but did not completely shut Craymer’s idea down. And this is completely fair! When Craymer first approached them with the idea, it was only a year after the band had broken up. Their band had just finished a wildly successful decade-long run from 1972 to 1982, and the band’s dissolution was at least in part due to the fact that ABBA had been comprised of two couple for years, and to put it lightly, wasn’t anymore. The dynamics had changed, and they had closed the doors (for now) on ABBA. But then, in 1995, four years before 1999 when the stage musical would officially premiere on the West End, Craymer’s idea gained legs. In ‘Mamma Mia! A Totally Original Musical’ she reports that Bjorn said, “If you can find the right writer and story, well… let’s see what happens.” And Craymer did.

In January of 1997, Craymer met a woman named Catherine Johnson. Johnson is a British playwright, and Craymer knew that she had found the right writer. Her instructions to Johnson about the plot were very specific. She says, “My brief to Catherine was that no lyrics could change, the story should  be a contemporary, ironic, romantic comedy and that if she listened  carefully to ABBA’s songs, she’d notice how they fell into two different  generations: the slightly younger, playful songs like ‘Honey, Honey’  and ‘Dancing Queen’, and the more mature, emotional songs such as ‘The  Winner Takes It All’ and ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’…and so the idea of a cross-generational love story was devised.”

By 1998, the full team was assembled. The final piece of the puzzle was who was going to direct the musical, and the solution to that problem came in the form of Phyllida Lloyd. Craymer refers to her as, “[Someone whose] background was serious, legit theatre and opera and her secret weapon was her ‘Dry Martini wit’.” Together, these three women made Mamma Mia! the success it is today.

I think that it’s really important that three women were the creative team for this movie. The plot features so much nuance, and is at its core about two groups of women who have found forever friends in each other. While the catalyst for the events of the movie is the protagonist’s search for her dad, it’s her relationship with her mother that gives context for everything else. It’s also her mother who grounds her, brings her back down to earth, supports her no matter what, and makes every selfless decision in the whole world to make sure that her daughter is making the best choices for her own life. The main characters aren’t saints or perfect decision makers, they’re better than that. They are nuanced women with wants and impulses, and it’s beautiful to watch their lives and relationships unfurl on screen (and on stage.)