JOURNALIST MARK SHENTON looks at the phenomenon that is MAMMA MIA!, from its 1999 world premiere to today, where more productions are playing simultaneously around the world than any other musical.

It was on March 23, 1999 that the musical MAMMA MIA! met its first and most crucial test when it was put in front of its first - ever paying audience in London - and was given the kind of welcome it has been getting ever since, every night, at every one of the many productions that have since followed. But on that early spring evening in London, it was still a completely unknown quantity. “We really had no idea how it was going to be received," reflects the producer Judy Craymer whose initial concept, exactly a decade earlier, had been to use existing ABBA songs within the format of a new, original musical. But happily, she remembers, “The audience went wild. They were literally out of their seats and singing and dancing in the aisles - and they still are. Every night.”

And now, they are doing so all around the world. It has become a global entertainment phenomenon; but it is one that works on a far more elemental basis, in which its creators have never lost sight of what they are seeking to achieve. That is, the process of personalising a familiar repertoire of particular ABBA songs in a fresh, vital and immediate way that simultaneously retains their pop integrity yet also does something more that is an essential requirement of good musical theatre: to advance an appealing story and comment on it.

But though in this case the songs came first - and it was Craymer’s genius to spot their theatrical potential so early on - she also had to find a way of unlocking that potential, with a story strong enough to carry them. “I knew from the outset that MAMMA MIA! had to be much more than just an ABBA compilation or tribute show,” she comments. “The story had to be as infectious as the music and provide a strong feel - good factor.” That, however, is easier said than done, and thus began Craymer’s decade - long crusade to find it and bring it to the stage. The producer, who had been in on the ground floor (or, at any rate, the backstage door) of another West End musical phenomenon when she was a stage manager on the original London production of CATS in 1981, had subsequently joined Tim Rice's production company, and it was there, while working as Executive Producer on the West End production of his, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s first post-ABBA project, CHESS, that she was first bowled over by Benny and Björn.