This weekend I finally dragged myself to Virginia to attend my very first show at Wolf Trap – one of our regions premiere summer concert venues. Generally I’m not a fan of attending concerts, especially outdoor events – it’s my anti-crowd bias and I’m a city slicker (ok, I live in the suburbs…), not a fan of the great outdoors. Wolf Trap is an indoor/outdoor hybrid where part of it is covered but there’s ample lawn space where you can bring a bunch of people to watch a show and have a nice picnic under the stars. My first show was the touring production of the long running hit Broadway hit Mamma Mia.
I’ve always been a fan of Abba, but the idea of this show has never really appealed to me, especially after watching the movie last year – which I turned off a 1/2 hour into. There is just something about a live production that brings spark to everything that the movie lacked. The cast headed up by leads Liana Hunt and Michelle Dawson was spunky and flawless.
A few weeks ago I reviewed American Idiot and complained that the Producers just took the music from Green Day and put it on a stage without bothering to create an actual story to justify it, it was a concert with Broadway trappings. The folk behind Mamma Mia show us how it should be done. They took all of these classic Abba songs and obviously put a lot of thought into what they mean and have woven a rich tapestry of a story around the tracks.
The plot centers on 21-year-old Sophie (Liana Hunt) who finds her mother’s (Michelle Dawson) diary and discovers she has three potential fathers. She invites them to her wedding in the hopes of discovering which one it is. There’s not much to talk about in regards to production values. The costumes looked great, but the set was pretty bare and Spartan.
After watching the show the songs actually have meaning for me, even tracks that I used to hate like The Winner Takes All has more impact after watching Dawson’s amazing show stopping performance of it. While all of the performances were great, there were some jarring transitions namely the way they went into Dancing Queen seemed to come out of nowhere and Take a Chance on Me was kind of weird. Other than these rare moments, the show had a really nice flow to it.
For the encore the entire cast came out and gave the audience a “concert” like performance of several of Abba’s greatest hits. The crowd went nuts and everyone left with a smile on their face.
Final Grade B
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted