Thoughts On A Bad Broadway Show

Last Wednesday, prior to the great bacon caper of 2006, Janna and I had opportunity to see Mamma Mia at the Wharton Center in East Lansing. This musical is based on the music of Abba. Let the record reflect that Abba sucks big time and I have nothing nice to say whatsoever about the music.

The story is of young Sophie who plans on being married to a dork named Skye. Our Sophie has a problem though, she doesn't know who her father is and she would like him to walk her down the aisle. It seems her mother was a whore and there are three possible fathers, it's a regular Maury Povich 'Who Da Daddy' show. Mother meanwhile is distraught that her daughter wants a traditional white wedding, she had thought such nonsense was done away with by her 70's generation. Who needs a husband anyway? Thankfully, our Sophie wants to do things the "right way" and so much as tells her mother that.

Mother is such a whore that she has no idea who the daddy is and isn't pleased to see these three gentleman in town for the wedding. Sophie thought she could figure out who the daddy is but unfortunately she can't. As the wedding approaches Sophie and Mother share touching moments together wherein Sophie realizes that a white wedding isn't all that important as long as there's love. At the alter she ditches the wedding and decides to shack up with Skye, no antiquated white wedding for her.

As you can see, the morals in this story are straight from New York and Hollywood. Traditional morality has to be thrown out the door in favor of love. The lessons taught in this show were downright evil, the writing meanwhile was dreadful. The writing for each character was unacceptably simple and even worse the plot was painfully predictable. One of the Daddy's turns out to be a homosexual, not only was that obvious from his first scene but it's just the kind of "scandalous" writing that has become old and tiresome. The only characters who were any good were the Mother's old friends, one of whom looked like Ina Garten the other of whom was a cross between Ann Coulter and that awful Semi-Homemade show host. Even these two were predicable liberals who were "shocked" over the thought of a white wedding.

And then there's the music. If I had to venture a guess 30% of it was sung live. It was quite obvious most of the performers were lip syncing. Sophie was the most obvious. A few of them were actually singing, including at least two of the fathers. The fact is, we were four rows from the front and really couldn't hear any of the actors live voices, though we could hear them blaring out of the trucked in giant concert speakers. What has Broadway come to when the actors can't even sing live? Heck, what has Broadway come to when pathetic Abba music is considered worthy of a show?

I give this musical a D-.