Anyone MAMMA MIA!-ing it tonight (7/18)? — Page 2

I'm jealous now. The audience I was with did not get into it at all. I was practically dancing in my seat though. There were a couple of really annoying girls sitting near me though. I mean to the point where I think one of them was on her cell phone in the theater. Someone told them to be quiet though, so they pretty much stopped after that. They looked like they were only 12 or something. But, like I said, it's at the cheap theater this week, so I will have to go back at least once or twice.

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did they remove "the name of the game"?

Seeing it tomorrow after my Millie matinee with some of my cast! Can't wait!!!!!

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I was being sarcastic.

One poster implied you should be able to get these tickets easily since he saw it at 4:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon (when 90% of the target audience would be working).

I think this movie will go chugging along drawing audiences for quite some time.

The very fact that there are heated discussions today about this movie
more than 30 years after the Beattles and Elvis Presley fans were mocking ABBA is prima facie evidence that the "old rules" don't apply to ABBA's music or its fan base which just keeps growing.

I once did an experiment with a car full of my daughter's friends when she was 16 (four years ago). I was listening to a football game and they asked if I would put on some music. My first selection was "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

"Is that all you have?", one friend asked.

"Do you know what this is?", I countered.

"Nope."

I then pulled out "Pet Sounds" and cued up "Sloop John B."

"Anybody know this?" I queried.

Silence.

"O.K. this is the last one... ."

Suddenly, the car was full of four diabolically off-key voices exulting to "DancingQueen".

"How do you know that song?" I asked before fast forwarding to "Mamma Mia" which brought about the same reaction.

Two of the girls had seen the show on Broadway, another had been hearing it on
the radio as long as she could remember.

Bjorn Ulvaeus was right. By some unknown combination of circumstances, ABBA'a music had become part of the "DNA" of pop. At some point in time it became more
pervasive universally in the here and now than the best work of John Lennon or Brian Wilson.

It wasn't long ago that you couldn't sweep the FM band from one side to the other
without hearing a Beattles song but now (and not just because of the musical or movie) ABBA's sounds are always lurking there somewhere. Not Sondheim's or Sinatra's but Agatha's and Frida's.

The world is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Updated On: 7/19/08 at 04:25 PM

Patash,

Thornton Wilder wrote in "Our Town",

"Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense."

It's no great mystery why it was the juvenility of watching "Candid Camera" episodes that allowed Norman Cousins to overcome a fatal disease.

Nor is it puzzling why for decades Bob Hope and not Norman Mailer entertained men and women in combat zones.

I have no idea how it is that "Dancing Queen" can cause such unbridled happiness in a 16-year-old girl living in Westchester and a 45-year old engineer in Seoul
or Tokyo.

That night, in one of those all-too-rare and fleeting "Slipping-through-my-fingers
moments" I asked my daughter what she had liked about "Mamma Mia" (she was one of the two kids who had seen it) and she said something which was so guileless that at the time it just sailed over my head.

"Whenever I hear 'Dancing Queen' or ...The lights are gonna find me
Shining like the sun...Feeling like a number one... . I feel like someone's
making a promise to me."

I had no idea what she meant. I think I do, now.

Seeing "Mamma Mia" on stage was the beginning of a journey that she would take that I could not have seen coming.

She asked a year or two after that, If "the Abba guys" had written anything new and I said "Yes, but it's very differant. It's called 'Kristina'.

I told her the music is in Swedish (she was thrilled to discover her grandmother's
people came to the U.S. from Sweden). I made a deal with her: if she would invest the time in reading Molberg's trilogy upon which the musical was based, I would buy her the triple C.D. I teased her with a You Tube clip of Peter Joback.

The blowback was incredible. She devoured the books, came to understand the magnitude of the courage those who emigrated to this country had, and began a search for her own "roots".

She spearheaded a project in her high school for people to trace their lineage.
Kids found handwritten letters from great-grandparents to people back home
in Russia and Israel and China.

All this from "Mamma Mia".

She listen's to "Kristina" every day and her musical taste has expanded from KROCK
to Aaron Copeland and Mozart. The same kid who only three years ago idolized Jessica Simpson was watching a breathtaking PBS special called "Visions of New York" and pointed out to me that the music behind one montage was from the
New World Symphony.

Let them laugh.

As cliched and threadbare as it now is, I'd tell Benny and Bjorn "Thank you for the music" in whatever form it manifests.

Updated On: 7/19/08 at 05:55 PM