Mammia Mia! has probably the largest format programme I’ve ever seen. While that may seem an odd thing to focus on for the review of a musical, it matters because this is more than theatre: it’s a phenomenon.
The show has toured the world for more than two decades with record breaking productions in Russia and China, places you might not immediately expect to go wild for Dancing Queen. It’s spawned two blockbuster Hollywood movies, with countless singalong showings. The weirdly pervasive place of Benny and Björn’s music in our collective consciousness means that, like the perma-show of the ABBA Voyage holograms, this is a product as much as a production.
And it is a fun product. The story is stupid, riddled with plot holes, and ridiculously easy resolved. But it all happens with joy, and the interplay with the lyrics of the Swedes’ songs is undeniably clever. The audience is largely there to enjoy themselves, and the cast usually seem to be doing so too.
It is not a great musical. For the most part the choreography is light, with just a couple of big scenes in Voulez-Vous and Does Your Mother Know that really feature intricate staging.
The current tour cast are a mixed bag vocally. Lydia Hunt as Sophie impresses most , easily carrying her numbers and giving convincing characterisation to boot. Jenn Griffin comes into her own in the her solo rendition of The Winner Takes It All, but is understated until then. Rosie Glossop as Rosie and Sarah Earnshaw are more about great comic performances – and they raise lots of big laughs in Take A Chance on Me and Does Your Mother Know respectively – than dazzling with song. Elsewhere, the ensemble backing is very welcome to mark the thinness of the voices.
But despite the ABBA song book being front and centre, this isn’t about dazzling harmonies. And it’s not about sharp dance moves. Or an especially witty book.
It’s about a feeling, an imagined nostalgia, a product. It’s about the silliness. The programme. The megamix – here even cynical, jaded, me, met my Waterloo. And it does all those very, very well.
- Mamma Mia! continues at Norwich Theatre Royal until Saturday 11 July 2026, tickets £21.20- £78.23, then touring internationally.