Mama Mia Theater article by moviesanddramas.blogspot.com

Mama Mia Theater article by moviesanddramas.blogspot.com



Mamma Mia! is an old-fashioned book musical written by Catherine Johnson and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, loosely based on the 1968 movie Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. Proudly independent Donna Sheridan (Louise Pitre), once a semihippie rock singer, has raised her daughter, Sophie (Tina Maddigan), alone. Now Sophie's getting married, and in an attempt to meet her real father she's invited three of her mother's former boyfriends to the wedding on a Greek island. Among the foreseeable scenes of drama, comedy, and pathos, Johnson has found room for 22 ABBA songs, much the same way that recent musicals Crazy for You and My One and Only created new uses for old Gershwin tunes.

Although the lyrics are uniformly insipid and fit the story about as well as those from any 1930s Rodgers and Hart musical (which is just barely), for those of us who grew up with ABBA, there's something thrilling about hearing "SOS SOS, code letters of the international distress signal. The signal is expressed in International Morse code as … — — — … (three dots, three dashes, three dots). " and "Take a Chance on Me" blasting from a Broadway stage. Some of Anthony Van Laast's choreography is pretty campy, and one of the would-be dads turns out to be gay, but mostly this is a big, schlocky, fun-for-the-whole-family Broadway musical.

But Mamma Mia! has ABBA, about whom we feel a curious ownership. My guess is that it started because we felt personally validated when the Swedish supergroup sang "You are a dancing queen." And as the Australian films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel's Wedding revealed, ABBA's cheerful artificiality made it the secret heart-music for awkward, dreamy girls and boys who know just what to do with yards of colorful fabric.

The 1939 film of The Women was made by a gay director (George Cukor), and the stars include several divas beloved by movie queens (Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer). But what makes it a gay camp classic is that it portrays a group of gossipy New York socialites pining for unseen men and viciously dishing each other.

The bristling bristling

see hackles. misogyny misogyny /mi·sog·y·ny/ (mi-soj´i-ne) hatred of women.
mi·sog·y·ny
n.
Hatred of women.


mi·sog of The Women is unsettling un·set·tle
v. un·set·tled, un·set·tling, un·set·tles

v.tr.
1. To displace from a settled condition; disrupt.

2. To make uneasy; disturb.

v.intr. , whether it resides in the characters or in the author. Equally disturbing to me is the assumption that bitch-fighting is automatically amusing to gay men. When we embrace The Women (or AbFab), are we laughing because it's over-the-top or because we're validating the stereotype of fags as women haters? Some might say, to borrow Flaubert's remark about Madame Bovary, "The women, they're us."

Scott Elliott's Broadway works primarily to showcase a remarkable cast of 25, including many stars from TV, stage, and film. Some do better than others--notably Cynthia Nixon, the fire-breathing Kristen Johnston, and the hilarious Jennifer Coolidge. The audience (mostly straight) lapped it up, along with the bitchiest exchanges--warming to the zingers For other uses, see .

Zingers are an American snack cake made by both Dolly Madison and Hostess, two iconic American snack food brands owned by Interstate Bakeries Corporation.
..... Click the link for more information. rather than the play's uneasy heartsickness heart·sick
adj.
Profoundly disappointed; despondent.


heartsick .

Maybe the dirty little secret these shows reveal is that gay taste isn't so different from the mainstream's anymore. Neither Mamma Mia! nor The Women is a cartoonishly trashy campfest. Nor could either be viewed as a savvy feminist critique of what bell hooks calls "the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." A couple of decades of pop culture have smoothed the sting of camp into the more acceptable flavor of kitsch.