Get out the curling tongs and blow-dryers - Abba are back in town!

International Mamma Mia! tour stops over in Helsinki for three weeks

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The Hartwall Arena in Helsinki barely had time to recover from the shock of hosting Europe's shiniest and campest annual song competition before it was pressed into action again, this time for a three-week residency of the Abba musical Mamma Mia!.
      The show, which opened in its first manifestation in London in 1999, 25 years to the day from when the Swedish group took Eurovision by storm with Waterloo, is now a multi-cast, multi-production enterprise.
      The Helsinki production - the so-called International Tour - is only one of around a dozen shows, with long-running residencies in London's West End, on Broadway, in Hamburg, Moscow, and Madrid to name but a few.
     
Put together originally by producer Judy Craymer, playwright Catherine Johnson, and director Phyllida Lloyd, the show was a breath of fresh air on its appearance.
      It does not seek to tell the history of the Swedish vocal band or its four members through their songs, as so often has happened with similar types of tribute musical in the past. In fact the very word "Abba" is not mentioned once in the entire show.
      What is does instead is provide a storyline - featuring taverna-keeper Donna and her illegitimate and now grown-up and engaged daughter Sophie - on which to hang the classic Abba hits and serve up provide a kind of bubbly all-singing, all-dancing karaoke musical.
     
As the writer of the lengthy Helsingin Sanomat feature article notes, Abba's catchy Swedepop music is just the sort that people find it easy to sing along to in the bathroom, using a set of curling-tongs or the blowdryer as a makeshift microphone.
     
The International Tour production has been on the road for two and a half years almost non-stop, and will be in Helsinki until June 3rd.
      The next venue will be in Tel Aviv, Israel, after which the crew head for China, with dates in Shanghai and Beijing.


Links:
  Mamma Mia! (Wikipedia)
  Ticket Sales Finland: Mamma Mia!, Hartwall Arena until 3.6.2007

Helsingin Sanomat