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Mamma Mia!: Thank You For The Music

In the fall of 2001, Mamma Mia! debuted on Broadway offering audiences an irresistibly bouncy musical that threaded the songs of the Swedish supergroup ABBA through a storyline about a single mother, Donna, who’s throwing a wedding for her daughter, Sophie. The setting is a Greek island where Donna—onetime lead singer of Donna and the Dynamos—now runs a local taverna. As for the wedding guests, they not only include Donna’s former backup singers, Tanya (Alison Ewing) and Rosie (Mary Callanan), but also three former lovers.

Photo by Joan Marcus

More than 5,600 performance later theatregoers are still loving in the show’s non-stop fun and romance played out to such infectious ABBA hits as “Dancing Queen,” “The Winner Takes It All” and “S.O.S.” And they still feel connected to the story of a single parent letting go her of her child.

If anyone understands the appeal of Mamma Mia!, it is Judy McLane, whose original audition for the role of Donna was detoured when she was cast instead as Tanya, Donna’s sexy, thrice-divorced pal. Then, after seven and a half years walking the walk in Tanya’s stiletto heels, she took on the role of Donna in 2012.

“I call [the show] the anti-depressant,” said McLane. “A woman came to the stage door; she was celebrating her 85th birthday. “She had tears in her eyes and said she hadn’t had this much fun in 40 years,” recalled the veteran Broadway actress. “I get choked up saying that. That’s why I’m here. I take very seriously their need to have a good time and take them on a journey.”

It is, indeed, a journey, complicated by the discovery by Sophie (the adorable Elena Ricardo), that her father could be any one of the trio of men her mother had romantic flings with “back in the day”: Sam (Victor Wallace), Harry (Paul DeBoy) and Bill (John Hemphill).

Sophie, who unbeknownst to Donna, sent invites to all three just prior to her wedding, hopes that one of them will walk her down the aisle when she gets wed to Sky (a buff Jon Jorgenson making his Broadway debut).

Assessing the variety of roles in the show, McLane noted, “People can relate to some character on the stage... whether you’re young, older, gay or straight. And there’s a type of character that most people can relate to: the single parent. People say they cry when I sing `Slipping Through My Fingers.’ ”

And while McLane is clearly attuned to audience reaction, she said she rarely looks out at them until the end when the cast—rocking out in shiny Spandex—gives a three-song, post-show, mini-concert. Only then does she observe the reaction from the seats.

“We see everything that’s going on—and most people are pretty darned happy,” she said, adding that when the show was at the Winter Garden Theatre (where it originated before moving to the Broadhurst in 2013), she and the other two Dynamos rose up on a hydraulic lift from below the stage at the end to a response that at first she could not comprehend. “I remember this roar,” she said. “I didn’t know what the sound was but realized it was the audience screaming.”

Now the Mamma Mia! era is winding down: a closing date has been scheduled for September 12th. It will bow out as the eighth longest-running musical in Broadway history, having grossed in excess of $680 million—about one-third of the show’s $2 billion global box-office total.

“There’s a sense of nostalgia,” McLane said. “We’ve gotten a lot of response from [cast] alumni, and they’re taking it hard—they’re crying. It’s been a very special show in that respect—more than any show I’ve ever done.”

As for McLane, when the final curtain drops she will hold the record for being longest-running principal in Mamma Mia!’s global run: ten unforgettable years.

Mamma Mia! is currently playing at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St. For reservations call 212-239-6200 or visit mamma-mia.com.

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