Mamma Mia!

All too often a barely mediocre show becomes a huge popular hit. Think Abie's Irish Rose or Tobacco Road. This is reassuring to anyone who believes in the dependable aberrance of mass taste. Another fine example is Mamma Mia!, first as a 2001 stage musical still running to near-capacity audiences on Broadway, and now, in its movie version, exponentially worse.

Onstage, Mamma Mia! is a jukebox musical based on the meretricious but lucrative idea of squeezing a number of immensely popular ABBA songs into a stage show jerry-built around them. Reviewing it, I wrote in New York magazine, "It is like someone finding a button in the street and having a suit made to match. With the difference, though, that a button allows much more freedom to the tailor than twenty-odd ABBA songs allow the book writer."

Like others, I pointed out the unholy resemblance to a run-of-the-mill 1968 movie, Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, which spawned the musical Carmelina, which paid for its charming superiority to Mamma Mia! with instant failure. Still, I hoped that the movie version of the latter would improve on the stage show. You cannot put an Aegean island and the Mediterranean Sea as easily on stage as on screen.

Never were hopes more summarily dashed. All the film accomplishes is to make the stage show's deficiencies more bloatedly blatant. While using somewhat fewer songs, it even more strenuously woos the lowest common denominator and may prove equally successful.

You may recall the story. Single mother Donna Sheridan, a former American rock singer, now runs a hostelry on a Greek island. Her daughter, Sophie, is about to be married and wants to find out which of her equally unsure mom's serial lovers was her biological father. Unbeknown to Donna, she invites all three to the wedding, and complications ensue.

Here I yield the word to Thomas Hischak's useful new Oxford Companion to the American Musical, which informs us that "millions of dollars worth of tickets were sold [to the stage show] without patrons wondering what it was, who was in it, or who put it together." Such was the magic of ABBA. As Hischak notes, "A weak libretto, lack of stars, and damning notices couldn't keep [it] from becoming a hit because audiences walked into the theater singing the songs and decided they liked it before the curtain went up." And at the end of most performances, there was dancing in the aisles.

Something similar may happen with the movie. The beatifically grinning middle-aged woman sitting next to me at a screening was singing along and clapping her hands; others behind us may have been doing the same. After all, the movie even has stars.

[IMG:R] Like the show, it was directed by stage director Phyllida Lloyd, whose first film this is. Right off, we are hit over the head by Haris Zambarloukos' cinematography. Every trick the camera and special effects are capable of is pressed into service, resulting in much of the film's looking like a hypertrophic travel brochure from the Greek Tourist Bureau.

The sea is unremitting picture-postcard blue with gently dancing waves that, if you don't bite your tongue, may well rock you to sleep. The island, seemingly a gussied-up real one, resembles a museum cyclorama with toy-like buildings so blindingly snow white you may want to reach for your sunglasses. Needless to say, changing times of day are conjured up, from swoonily razzle-dazzle sunsets to ultramarine evenings with figures in romantic silhouette. But mostly it is sanguine sunlight, bringing out the motley costumes in all their technicolorful witchery.

Lloyd has enlisted a host of extras to dancingly and songfully dog the principals, enough souls to people the entire Peloponnesus, never mind a tiny island. It is a politically correct polymorphous multitude, ranging from dignified elders to a dreadlocked Rastafarian youth. When they lift their voices in song, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir seems to invade the soundtrack.

Most mindboggling is the editing. Lloyd went ape over jump cuts, so that much of the continuity is dizzying enough to suggest an editor suffering from serious attention deficit disorder. Especially so during each musical number, when the locale and costuming undergo lightning changes every few bars, turning a sequence into frantically stitched-together sound bites.

And what of the stars? As Donna, Meryl Streep displays her usual acumen, but comes across a bit too matronly to have ever been a free-spirited swinger. As her former singing-group partners, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski carry on like two of the Three Stooges in drag. Daughter Sophie, played by a relentlessly hysterical and eyeball-popping Amanda Seyfried (sort of Kristin Chenoweth on steroids), likewise has a couple of sidekicks, carefully selected to look even less appetizing than she.

As the father candidates in this trio-obsessed tale, Pierce Brosnan is too dashingly glamorous, Colin Firth saddled with the clumsiest dialogue and illogically emerging closet homosexuality, and sedately stocky Stellan Skarsgard cast doubtless as a sop to Sweden, the home of ABBA.

The songs are pleasant enough, but would profit from less hyperkinetic treatment. The cinematic Mamma Mia! makes this session with ABBA about as odorous as a trip to the abattoir.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.