Now that three full years have passed, I don’t spend much time lamenting the things my kids lost during the early stages of the pandemic, when schools closed for the final three months of the school year. That is, I didn’t spend much time lamenting, until I saw the Liberty Bell Drama Company’s production of “Mamma Mia!” at The Merc Playhouse last Friday night. Since then, I’ve regretted that my older daughter missed out on an opportunity to be a part of something dramatically magnificent, unique and inventive.
“Mamma Mia!” was in rehearsal during the winter/spring of 2020 and my kid was in the cast, a sophomore at Liberty Bell High School, when COVID suddenly put a screeching halt to, well, everything.
Eventually the world reopened, sort of, and the Liberty Bell Drama Company produced a compelling of performance of “The Laramie Project” on TwispWorks’ outdoor pavilion stage in May of 2021, followed by a contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in the spring of 2022. Now, finally, after warming up with those award-winning (the former) and canonical (the latter) scripts, the drama company cast and crew were ready for “Mamma Mia!” which through the popular tunes of the Swedish band ABBA tells the story of a betrothed young woman on the eve of her wedding searching to learn who her father is.
OK, you had me (and many others) at “ABBA.” If I knew how to make a backwards B on my computer keyboard I’d type it properly. Tell me that you don’t sing out loud when an ABBA song comes on the radio and I’ll tell you that you just don’t know the lyrics. (Or that your car doesn’t have a radio. But knowing me, knowing you, you have a radio, as well as a playlist, and you’re not above belting it out when a favorite tune comes out of the speakers.)
But the Liberty Bell version of “Mamma Mia!” transcends ABBA’s lyrics and legend. Oh sure, Meryl Streep knocked it out of the park in the film “Mamma Mia!” and countless Broadway, community theater and high school drama program actors have immortalized various roles in the script. But I’d wager that none of them were as imaginative as those in the drama company cast. Directors Kelly Grayum and Danbert Nobacon took a chance on the ensemble being able to pull off what the drama company never got the opportunity to do in 2020 and the gamble paid off.
Extra fun was the fact that when I saw the play I was seated within arms’ reach of several former members of the drama company, who were sophomores cast in “Mamma Mia!” in 2020 before the world narrowed. I found myself having to focus on immersing myself in the sheer joy and energy apparent on stage, to keep myself from mourning those kids’ sense of loss about the missed opportunity to be a part of such a dynamic production. “Don’t go wasting your emotion,” the cast onstage cautioned me. So I didn’t.
But do I love what the Liberty Bell kids did with “Mamma Mia!”? I do, I do, I do. To Kelly and Danbert, I bow down. You guys are Super Troupers. To the cast I simply say “thank you for the music.”
