Mama Mia! I'll never stop thanking Abba for the music

Mama Mia! I'll never stop thanking Abba for the music
Judy Craymer created the ‘Mamma Mia!’ musical juggernaut and has remained the driving force through the making of the original musical and two smash hit films. Here, she talks about the project from its roots to its record breaking successes







The Independent

Back in 1982, I was working with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus on Chess. I was employed as Tim Rice’s assistant. Abba had just disbanded and my first job was to go and meet Björn from the airport. I’d always loved the Abba songs but that was when I fell in love with them. Meeting Benny and Björn and working with them over the next five years I became very interested in those songs, which I think they thought they had left behind, as they were working on other musical projects.

When I was younger I was a kind of Abba fan but I was more into Bowie, and I went through the rock phase of the Led Zeppelins and the Emerson, Lake and Palmers. I loved “Dancing Queen” but I never went to an Abba concert.



Fellow Abba-hating queers – you’re not alone. I can’t stand Mamma Mia!
Yet I was compelled by the songs and by meeting the guys. The song “The Winner Takes it All” was the inspiration for Mamma Mia! and when I met Björn I wanted to know what must have been going round in his head when he wrote that song.

It’s a huge kind of romance/breakup song; a woman having a conversation in her head with a man who has hurt her and let her down or maybe cheated on her. "Tell me does she kiss, like I used to kiss you?" The lyrics are full of hurt; it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. But how do you make a musical out of a song that is taking you towards Greek tragedy? That’s what I love about Abba songs. They take you on this journey, and even if they hit a certain emotional spot, you’re still left feeling in a good mood.

Judy was compelled by Benny and Björn and by the songs they had crafted in Abba (PA)
I felt that the idea of hearing somebody sing that song in the theatre was kind of like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”; it was "the 11 o’clock number " as they say on Broadway – the second act show-stopper.

Benny and Björn were against anything that would be a tribute or a biographical story; but that didn’t interest me either. Björn was interested at first more than Benny because the musical was to use his lyrics as the source material. Those amazing words took us through the stage show and now two films.

It was funny working on the second film because people would say: “Are there enough songs?” I certainly thought there were, and in fact I think there’s a whole new audience that didn’t know Abba, didn’t grow up with Abba, didn’t know them as a band and yet know those songs as Mamma Mia! And I think that tickles Benny and Björn quite a lot, actually.

The girls haven’t been so involved because Benny and Björn wrote the songs. But Frida has always been very supportive. And Agnetha too for that matter.


Of course, I was passionate and keen about the show, but I had to work hard convince people that it wasn’t just a performance in which people were going to be dressing up as Frida and Agnetha and Benny and Björn.

I knew that those songs worked for two generations. For the younger audience members there was “Honey Honey” and “Dancing Queen”, the dancing songs. And then there’s the more emotional breakup songs, for more mature viewers. I toyed with different ideas, then in the mid-nineties, Björn told me that if I could find the right story he and Benny might be interested. That’s when I met playwright Catherine Johnson and pitched all my thoughts to her about generations, and it had to be weddings or holidays. It had to be something nostalgic that took you to a happy place and she came up with the genius mother-daughter idea; set over a wedding, and the idea of a mother and a daughter and three possible fathers. And that immediately appealed to Björn and Benny.

I hadn’t thought of it then as becoming a film – actually, I thought it might make a small TV film. But I always had a pull towards a stage show. And now I’ve overseen 50 productions.

The show opened in 1999. And the original film we shot in 2007. I wanted to do another film and so did Universal. I wanted Catherine and Phyllida [Lloyd, director of the first film] to be involved, but Phyllida thought it was time to wish someone else well, and Catherine I think felt that she loved it as it was and she couldn’t quite see where another story would begin and end. I was enthused to do a prequel, but if we did a prequel how would we bring our original cast back. That’s where Richard Curtis came in.

The stakes were high because Mamma Mia! had done 20 years in London and the last film was one of the most successful musical films.


I had seen Love Actually. I adored Richard Curtis’s work. If we were to do another film we had to explore different emotions, and he is so brilliant not just at romance but also taking risks on life and loss: at the heart of all his comedies is loss. He thought of this in the sense of going back and forth and to different places, and all he had to say to me was The Godfather: Part II and I completely got it.

Even the music is like The Godfather: Part II; rich sweeping ballads. It underscores. There’s a rich palate of Abba in there.

It was always the intention to use songs from the first film. You have to have “Dancing Queen”. Why would you go and see your favourite band if they’re not going to play your favourite songs?

There were songs that I knew still had the power of storytelling and also the power of comedy, something fun which has come from the stage show, whether its “Chiquitita” or “Take a Chance”.


Curtis said he loved Mamma Mia! and Abba, and though he didn’t have time to write it himself, he was happy to support and if there was a writer he liked and wanted to work with. That writer was Ol Parker, who came on board as a writer at that time (and then later the director).

So it was a matter of making the story work. Meryl Streep had always been very affectionate to Mamma Mia! and being in a possible sequel but I knew she never was going to take on a role as big as the first one. And for her to be part of it, what song? You can’t really top “The Winner Takes it All” from the first film, and she wasn’t going to be running along rooftops and jumping off cliffs singing lots of Abba songs. “My Love My Life” is an incredibly affecting song and I think equal to “The Winner Takes it All”.



I’m going to claim Cher as my idea, though Ol would probably also claim it as his. I’ve always loved Cher, and actually had a conversation with her for the last movie before we cast Christine Baranski, to see whether Cher would be interested in playing Tania then. She wasn’t, but she said to me recently it worked out well this way round. I also felt, if we’re going to do a second film, we hit a high with Meryl on the first and now we’ve got to hit it out of the park. Who is one of the greatest actors who can sing? There’s Cher, there’s Bette Midler and there’s Barbra Streisand. There was always going to be a mother character. Ol wrote it as the ultimate rock chick, and with Cher in mind. But I was always fixated that Cher would be the perfect casting.

She really embraced it, and Mamma Mia! has traditionally had great female roles which we lack in musical theatre and in movies. And we cast brilliant actors. So now we have three generations with Cher and Meryl; Christine Baranski and Julie Walters; and Amanda Seyfried and the Lily James generation – and Cher gets the guy.

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Cher duets with Andy Garcia in a show-stealing scene from the upbeat sequel (Universal Pictures/AP)
“Fernando” was a favourite Abba song of hers and it was very tempting for her to sing it. I think with this film we could have a wink at the audience with how we use this old song, and it’s a brilliant moment when they discover each other again, and she tells that story through the power of her voice. You feel she was probably rebelling as a young woman in her early twenties, and then probably when she was Donna Sheridan’s mum; hanging out at Studio 54 too much. And now we see her come back in her full glory as Ruby Sheridan – or as Cher, in fact.


It was said that the last film invigorated people, and I think it probably did. We ran all summer, the summer of the financial crash, and it brought people of every age to the cinema. As a show we opened at the most tragic of all times in New York, the time of 9/11. You’ve got this massive show and one of the worst tragedies that you can imagine. How do you deal with that? With everyone involved, and the city in complete crisis, while people have to keep going and earn a living? It was a difficult time but then-Mayor Giuliani was incredibly galvanising to the Broadway community. People asked us: “Are you still going to open?” and the answer had to be yes. Everyone thought about it a lot and I know Phyllida sat and talked to the cast when we were rehearsing and it was almost like a therapy for them. But of course in a way it was the best thing for everyone to make the show happen.


I don’t think there will be a “Mamma Mia 3!”. It’s great that people are thinking that way; I think people feel very safe with Mamma Mia! and this new movie has a lot more emotional heft, and it really makes you laugh and cry: it’s a kind of shared experience. And those songs, of course. They said, back when the show opened: “Oh people don’t always know those Abba songs.” But now “When I Kissed the Teacher” – the opening song on the movie – that’s been trending on Spotify.

Mamma Mia! was way before social media in the case of the stage show, and the last movie was before social media, so it’s a massive tool now for marketing and communication and appealing to a younger audience. So it’s fascinating that I see on social media that there’s a younger audience going: “Please do ‘Mamma Mia 3’!” That’s the natural thing for them. One comment was “Why can’t it become the new Fast and Furious?” which made me laugh a lot.

Judy Craymer was talking to David Lister

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/mamma-mia-2-here-we-go-again-abba-judy-craymer-musical-film-theatre-cher-meryl-streep-a8573726.html

The conception of the “Mamma Mia” phenomenon dates back several decades

‘Mamma Mia’ maestro Judy Craymer hopes lightning strikes twice
Craymer senses that the times are right for another dose of joyful escapism.

BY EMILY ZEMLERLOS ANGELES TIMES

LONDON — Judy Craymer still remembers the first time she heard ABBA.

Although she professes to have been more of a fan of David Bowie and heavy rock as a teenager, the Swedish pop group’s melodies stuck with Craymer, and she sensed a visual connection in the music. “I always loved their videos – because they were the first to do those videos – and I always saw a sense of fun comedy and self-deprecation,” the producer says, sitting in her office in London’s ritzy St. James district.

Today, Craymer has made a name for herself as the creator and producer of “Mamma Mia!,” a jukebox musical that sprang from many of ABBA’s most beloved songs. As a producer, she’s also the creative force behind the 2008 film adaptation, which grossed just under $610 million worldwide (on an reported budget of $52 million). A sequel, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” featuring a fresh time-jumping storyline and deeper cuts from the group’s catalog, opened July 20.

If the timing for a kind-hearted and uplifting entertainment feels right, Craymer says the musical has always been a reminder of why we need joyful escapism.

“I think ‘Mamma Mia’ has always been a great antidote to battered lives, in a sense,” Craymer says. “The show opened on Broadway just after 9/11. The last film opened just before a recession in 2008. It is something that connects people, besides the fact that you do feel that you’re on the perfect vacation. There’s nothing political. There’s just something empowering in it.”

The conception of the “Mamma Mia” phenomenon dates back several decades to when Craymer initially met ABBA songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus while working as a production assistant for Tim Rice during the 1984 London production of “Chess.” Seeing the massive attention that the musicians garnered only bolstered Craymer’s ongoing interest in the band.

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“I would go home and listen on a cassette player to ABBA records,” she says. “Bjorn really seemed to understand what a woman would be going through in a break-up. I think if I hadn’t known them, I wouldn’t have been able to make the approach. I said to them then, in the ’80s, ‘I’d love to do something with your songs, a stage musical.’ And they said ‘Never gonna happen.’ ” She laughs. “But they gave some encouragement. They said ‘If one day you can find the right story.’ It was a matter of finding it, a bit like the challenge of (a second) film. They were always encouraging and now we’ve had a business together for over 20 years.”


Amanda Seyfried, left, and Meryl Streep in a scene from “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.” Photo courtesy Jonathan Prime/Universal Pictures via AP

Craymer eventually found the right narrative, a lively tale of a single mother whose daughter invites her three possible dads to her wedding in Greece. To date, the stage version of “Mamma Mia” has been produced 50 times worldwide in 16 different languages, including Chinese and Finnish. Since opening in London in 1999, the play, named best musical at the Tony Awards in 2002, has spread to 440 cities and grossed over $2 billion at the box office. The film version is the highest grossing live-action musical worldwide.

A sequel was inevitable for Universal Pictures, although Craymer – as well as Andersson and Ulvaeus – wasn’t always convinced.

“What it was going to be has always been the difficulty,” Craymer says. “People asked, ‘Well, why not three years after the first one?’ That was never on the menu because bringing the band together wasn’t right at that time. I think it was serendipitous in a sense because now, 10 years on, feels right. I think there would have been more cynicism a few years ago after the first one.”

When Phyllida Lloyd, who directed the stage musical as well as the 2008 film, and screenwriter Catherine Johnson bowed out of participating in the sequel, it was up to Craymer to find the best filmmaker to take the helm. Her first call was to Richard Curtis, whom she had originally approached to write the musical back in 1997. “He’s always been a writer I admired. He really knows how to handle that romantic comedy but also delving into marriage and real lives and loss,” she notes. “‘Love Actually’ had all the ingredients I felt were needed if we were going to do another ‘Mamma Mia.’ ”

Curtis wasn’t available to direct or fully pen the screenplay, but he was interested in participating in its conception. He suggested Ol Parker (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) to write the screenplay and the pair collaborated to create a story that flashes between the present and the past.


Judy Craymer Photo courtesy of IMDB

“I got an email from Richard that just said ‘Random question: Do you like ABBA?’ ” Parker says. “I wrote back going ‘Massively, yes.’ I thought he might be asking me to DJ a party or something. And then he told me about ‘Mamma Mia.’ I went to meet Judy, and I just loved her as all do. We got on great from the beginning.”

Parker was commissioned to write the script in the fall of 2016 and Universal green-lit the film in January 2017 for production that summer. Parker was brought on as the director and the selection of the new cast members took place as soon as the legacy cast – including Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Dominic Cooper, Colin Firth, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters and Stellan Skarsgård – signed up. The key element was Meryl Streep, who played leading lady Donna Sheridan in the original film and returns in the sequel in a limited capacity.

“She was always part of the conversation,” Craymer says. “She was never, ‘Oh yes, I’m really, really keen to do a sequel.’ We’d always stayed in touch about it, but it was a matter of whether there was the right script and what the concept of it was. And what songs she would sing was very important. She was never going to just sign up for singing and dancing nine songs as she had in the original.”

Lily James was cast as the younger version of Donna, whose journey to the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi as she meets three very different suitors is interspersed with present day, where her daughter, Sophie, (Seyfried) discovers she’s now pregnant on the same island. And while Streep doesn’t anchor “Here We Go Again” as she did the original, the filmmakers found additional star power by securing the participation of another Oscar-winning icon – Cher – for the small but pivotal role of Donna’s jet-set mother. (Parker notes the legendary performer signed on in part because she’d get the chance to sing one of her favorite songs, “Fernando.”)

Like in the last film, the story leaps between ABBA tunes, using tracks such as “Waterloo” and “When I Kissed the Teacher” to move the narrative along. Some of the same songs are used in different ways, such as “Super Trouper,” which appears as the end credits number instead of as part of the story.

For Craymer, the sequel takes on more emotional gravity than its predecessor – dealing with weighty issues such as death, legacies and the passage of time – which is often on display in the musical numbers.

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“I’m very pleased that it has a weight to it that I think will surprise people,” she says. “ABBA songs – they’re great pop songs and a gift in themselves, but it’s fun to have explored them even more and brought to a heft to the lives of those people on-screen.”

“I tried to give it an emotional underpinning that wasn’t in the first one quite as much,” Parker adds. “I remember Meryl saying when the first one came out, ‘In these times people need joy and happiness, and this is an important film right now.’ And that’s only become tragically more true in these desperate days. We were all aware that we were trying to do something that will put joy out there. That’s got to be real – you can’t fake it – and part of that comes from the music and part of that comes from the vibe on set. It’s very hard when you’re listening to ‘Dancing Queen’ 20 times in a row not to have the best day of your working life.”

The connection between fans has only grown since the musical first debuted in London in 1999. Craymer sees the story as the “The Sound of Music” for the new generation, a collection of songs that kids grow up listening to as their formative theater experience. The secondary rights are currently going out across the U.S. and the play will relaunch in China this fall.

If the success of “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is on par with the first film, Craymer is interested in bringing the musical back to Broadway or the possibility of launching a new musical based on the second film. For Craymer, who makes her decisions on instinct, “Mamma Mia” has grown from a pipe dream into a continually evolving and growing universe that is still filled with possibilities.

“It’s been my own mini Disney,” she says. “That’s how it really has been in my life. I never take it for granted, really. A lot was at stake to do another film. It’s a much-loved brand and much-loved show and much-loved last film. There were a lot of people like ‘Well, don’t (screw) up.’ No pressure.”

https://www.pressherald.com/2018/07/29/mamma-mia-maestro-judy-craymer-hopes-lightning-strikes-twice-for-feel-good-franchise/

Mamma Mia: Cher’s last day of filming

Instagram judycraymer

#FlashbackFriday Cher-ing a glass of champagne on Cher’s last day of filming 😉 with choreographer Anthony Van Laast and some of the crew 🎬🐣💃🏼 #mammamia2 #herewegoagain #behindthescenes

March 30, 2018

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg8njduH5p


March 28, 2018



https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg3uP36nhd5