When “Mamma Mia!” producer Judy Craymer first pitched an ABBA jukebox musical to the band’s songwriters, she knew she didn’t want the show to be a tribute concert or “The ABBA Story.” Craymer told Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus she wanted to create an original book musical. Unconvinced, Andersson and Ulvaeus told Craymer to find the right book writer and they’d consider it.
Craymer found playwright Catherine Johnson, who then wrote “Mamma Mia!” into what is often considered the blueprint for the non-biography jukebox musical. Johnson crafted an original story about a mother, Donna, and her daughter, Sophie, as they get ready for Sophie’s wedding and confront the lingering question: Who is Sophie’s dad? Johnson wove 22 ABBA songs into the narrative, rendering these pop tunes as solo ballads, ensemble production numbers and comedic showstoppers. And yet, when audiences show up to an ABBA musical, they still want to hear the songs they know. As it turns out, the way the ABBA’s tunes are performed within “Mamma Mia!” is incredibly specific.
“Benny and Bjorn, the ABBA writers, they insisted that every note sound exactly like they did in the album,” David Holcenberg, music director of the original Broadway production and music supervisor on the current one, told Broadway News on “Broadway Press Day with Ruthie Fierberg.”
“They sent someone to Sweden to lift every note off of the original master tapes, every note off the bass part, the guitar parts, the keyboard parts, and that’s 95 percent of what we play in the band. And all the vocal tracking [parts] that they were famous for, those are also directly off the album,” Holcenberg continued. “Within [those] confines, we still had to find structures.”
