Mamma Mia

On I visited the Novello Theatre in London to watch a play called Mamma Mia. The genre of this play was a musical, but I think it was more than just a musical; it could have also come under the genre of comedy. Mamma Mia is about a girl called Sophie who lives with her mother on a small Greek island is about to be married to Sky and wishes for her father to walk her down the aisle. However, she doesn’t know who her father is. Her mother does not want to tell her and so Sophie reads her mother’s diary and discovers the name of three men who could possibly be her father. Sophie secretly invites all three men to the wedding. The fun starts when the three men arrive on the island and are trying to hide from Sophie’s mother Donna.

The show bounds along with endless energy and enthusiasm. The mixture of Abba songs, camp dance routines, platform boots and Lycra costumes based around a soppy romance comedy script creates a delightful evening of sheer fun and pleasure. This is pop music set to pop culture, pure unapologetic seventies tackiness that makes for a great evening’s entertainment.

I think that during the play, the lighting was used very well. It was used to change the mood of not just the characters but also the audience. An example of this is when Sophie is getting ready for her wedding and her mother is helping her get ready, and she sings the song ‘slipping through my fingers’ the music went from being all happy and fast to being slow and meaningful, this shows contrast and the way the song is preformed makes it a very emotional scene in the play. The lighting was used very well because it showed which character was most important during the scene, it helped by dimming all of the lights around the theatre except from one spotlight on Sophie and her mother. This showed that this scene was just about the relationship between Sophie and her mother, which I thought was heartwarming for the audience.

In the play there was a great use of props, an example of this is the pieces of scenery that were kept onstage throughout the whole performance to represent different parts of the island and building, whether the