Mamma Mia! has final performance in Toronto: The Dancing Queen hangs up her shoes for good...
I was in New York this weekend and watching the NYC promo channel. They always do a bit on the current Broadway shows and show footage from the shows. It was Sunday and they were featuring Mamma Mia!, and showing shots of all the different productions going on around the world (Korea, Japan, Australia and so on...) and they said there are currently 14 productions of Mamma Mia! going on around the globe. Wow! Then I remembered, they need to revise that and make it 13.
On Sunday May 22 the Toronto production finally met its "Waterloo".
That's right, according to an article in the Toronto Star (O Mamma, Such A Fine Run by Richard Ouzounian, Saturday May 21, 2005) Mamma Mia! is leaving after 5 years, 2,044 performances, and $200 million in box office receipts.
Wow. Considering I was shunned in high school for being a huge ABBA fan, that's amazing.
And Toronto was key to launching the show worldwide. According to Judy Craymer, a producer on the show, "In many ways Toronto has been responsible for Mamma Mia! Its success here gave us the confidence we needed to take the show around the world"
The original Donna, Louise Pitre, went on to open the show, along with her young co-star Tina Maddigan, on Broadway. Louise went on to earn a well-deserved Tony nomination.
Inexplicably, I've never been a fan of the show (which is odd since, like I said, I LOVED ABBA in high school). But maybe I got off on the wrong foot. I saw it in Toronto when it first opened with Louise Pitre. She was great, but I had purchased seats right underneath the speakers. It hadn't even dawned on me that this being more of a rock and roll show than traditional musical, it would be HEAVILY ampliphied. So my husband, daughter and I watched most of the show with our fingers in our ears to keep them from bleeding. Now maybe they adjusted the sound over the years, and maybe if I had been in the front row balcony, I would have been standing and cheering. But that's all water under the bridge now.
Cheers to everyone involved with the Toronto production of Mamma Mia! over the years! As Richard Ouzounian said in his article, "And, best of all, it made a lot of people happy."
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