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Sunday, August 25, 2002

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

ABBA was once the most popular group in the world, a bubblegum factory from Sweden whose early English-as-a-second-language lyrics only added to the weightless charm of hits as instantly engaging as "Waterloo" (the song that put them on the map outside Stockholm), "Honey, Honey," "S.O.S.," "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do" and "Mamma Mia."

ABBA scored its first and only U.S. No. 1 with "Dancing Queen" in the winter of '77 and disbanded five years later, citing threats of death and kidnapping as their reason for packing it in.

The group has never reunited.

But that hasn't stopped the songs from living on. In fact, if anything, it may have helped.

In 1992, Erasure topped the U.K. charts with "ABBA-esque," a dance-pop tribute to the group.

Released in 1993, the same year Bono took to singing "Dancing Queen" on tour with his band, U2, "ABBA Gold" remains a staple of the Billboard Top Pop Catalog chart here in the States, which, frankly, never warmed to ABBA half as much as everybody else. Last week, after 269 weeks on the charts, the 19-song collection finished No. 30 with a bullet.

ABBA songs have been featured to brilliant effect in films, from "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" in 1994 to "Muriel's Wedding" the following year.

A new generation had ABBA to thank for the music when another Swedish group, the A*Teens, hit the U.S. charts with a cover of "Dancing Queen" two years ago.

And now, of course, the songs that made such tributes possible have provided the framework for a musical called "Mamma Mia!" A hit in London and New York, it makes its way to Heinz Hall on Tuesday with the blessings and involvement of the men who truly wrote the songs that made the whole world sing, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson.

Producer Judy Craymer approached Ulvaeus in the early '90s with the concept of building a show around the hits, by which point he and Andersson had tested the waters of musical theater with "Chess," on which they'd worked with Tim Rice.

As Ulvaeus recalls the pitch from Craymer, "she was working for a television production company at the time. And she said, 'I've got this idea. I want to do a television special built around ABBA music, but with a kind of a little story around it as well.' And I thought it sounded quite charming. So I said to her, 'If you can find someone who will write a good script that Benny and I like, of course you can do it.'"

Several drafts from several writers later, he was introduced to Catherine Johnson, who landed the gig to write the book.

"I could immediately see that she was the right person," Ulvaeus says. "She was witty. She was funny. She had something special."

And her timing was impeccable. He met her shortly after wrapping up "The Emigrant," his second play, in Sweden, and taking the family to "Grease" in London.

"I'd seen 'Grease' before on film," he says, "but never as a musical. And I don't think it was a very good version. It seemed kind of tired after five years or whatever. But all of a sudden, I could see the potential of a funny, uplifting family musical with lots of hit songs, which 'Grease' really is. So from then on, I was 100 percent on board. And here we are now."

He made just one demand with regard to the music: "I said the idea of this challenge is we must use the songs the way they are with the original lyrics,"' he recalls. "But I said this to Catherine, 'You've got about 100 songs here in the catalog to choose from.'"

Not that she was free to choose from every song in ABBA's catalog.

"I had a few exceptions," Ulvaeus admits with a laugh. "But I won't tell you what they are."

Among the songs she didn't pick are some he considers his "darlings." But he's fine with that. If anything, he encouraged the thinking that led to "Fernando," for instance, not making the cut.

"I repeated the mantra," he says, "that I heard from Broadway and the West End, that the most important thing about a musical is story, story and story. That is the eternal truth, really. I said, 'Never forget that the story is more important than the songs. So if you want to get a song in that doesn't really fit, forget it.'"

He's been told, he says, that ABBA's music translates as well as it does to the stage because of something that he hadn't even noticed he'd been doing -- "writing little stories," he says, "which could illustrate various kinds of relationships."

The reason the play is a hit, of course, has more to do with how much people still respond to ABBA after 20 years of silence.

It's that very silence that Ulvaeus points to as the key to the music's enduring appeal.

"We're the ones who decided to stop at the very right moment," he says. "I think it's got something to do with that, that the image of us still is as we were. And we've never even attempted a comeback for money or for any other reason."

So they're never getting back together then?

"No, no, no, no," he says. "That's out of the question. It's not gonna happen."