COLUMNISTS When in doubt, take charge of a Greek island. It worked for King Minos. It worked for Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin). It has worked for the show-makers determined to build a musical around Abba’s greatest hits. Mamma Mia!, the international stage success featuring every song you know from the former Swedish chart-toppers (except “Fernando”, possibly not Greek enough, and “Knowing Me, Knowing You”, possibly too Alan Partridge), is now a movie and an exercise in terrifying, overpowering, sun-drenched glee.
Its enthusiasm is awesome. Its noise level is prodigious. Its singing is variable, with Meryl Streep bang in tune at one end and Pierce Brosnan clutching at notes at the other like a man trying to catch flies on a windy day. As the ageing pin-up among three potential biological fathers invited to “Kalokairi” by hotelkeeper Streep’s daughter Amanda Seyfried for the girl’s wedding – she has grown up without knowing a dad – Brosnan strums a brave but beleaguered larynx. Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard, as the rival pops, dance around in competing states of shirtlessness and tunelessness. Surging up against them like an Amazonian tsunami are Streep and her ex-pals from the “Dynamos” song troupe, played by Julie Walters and Christine Baranski. There are also singing cooks, shepherds, urchins, dogs, villagers...
