Audiences attending a performance of Mamma Mia! would rightly go in with the expectation of experiencing a party atmosphere. Typically described as being set in a Grecian paradise, the musical came together using existing songs from the library of the Swedish pop sensation, ABBA. With its characters from America and Great Britain, it’s an interesting concept and a unique blending of cultural representations. Though the production delivered on its promise of good-time fun, I was left wanting a bit more from the show as a whole.
The plot of Mamma Mia! is both zany and straightforward. Bride-to-be Sophie, here played by Mary Helen McCord, dreams of her father walking her down the aisle at her upcoming wedding in Greece, where she grew up. The only problem? She has no idea who he is. After finding and reading her mother’s old diary, she surmises there are three possible candidates. Throwing caution to the wind, she invites all three to the wedding with the assumption that when she meets them she’ll intuit which one is her dad. This leads to her mother, Donna, unexpectedly coming face-to-face with three old flames and all the requisite baggage the day before her daughter’s wedding, which she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about in the first place.
This show is about relationships and all the ways they can force a person to grow and learn. It’s about second chances and extending and receiving forgiveness. It covers friendships, romance, family, and heartbreak, and it does so in a lighthearted way despite its occasional deeply dramatic and powerhouse solo performances.
It’s also a strongly feminist production, intent on matter-of-factly presenting the long-held “traditional” view of marriage as something that doesn’t work for everyone. Female empowerment is a theme lovingly rendered in this musical. It remains as refreshing and important in 2026 as I’m sure it was in its original run.
My issues with the show lie partly in the play itself. At times, it’s the most fun an audience can have (“Dancing Queen” being sung into curling irons? Come on!), but at others the ABBA songs don’t quite manage to bridge the gap between pop hits and staged-musical. The plot sometimes skates over issues of believability in the hopes that the audience either won’t notice or won’t care. The production wasn’t nearly as polished and well-oiled as I would expect from a show well into its nearly sold-out run. Dancers colliding, mic packs visible, and an energy that lacked verve are all minor details, but taken together their detraction from a performance can create a deficit greater than the sum of its parts. Some casting decisions and wardrobe choices didn’t make sense to me. McCord has a voice more than capable of handling the nuance of the music, but her wig, costuming, and overall character design fought her in achieving her character’s youth and naive free spirit.
Plenty of moments, however, made the show worth watching. “The Winner Takes It All” is what inspired the musical in the first place, and Emily F. Chateau as Donna Sheridan brought all the requisite anger and raw emotion you would expect from that ballad. And while the collective energy of the ensemble struggled, there were clear individual performances that stood out. Nearly every element of humor in the show worked, with Rosie and Tanya, Donna’s old friends, played respectively by Jenny Odle Madden and Rebecca Brown Schulter, being the standout performances of the evening. Madden’s physical comedy as Rosie didn’t so much steal the show as veritably carry it.
While I had a mixed reaction, in the end it does what you expect Mamma Mia! to do — amid deeply human themes, it is unquestionably fun and an opportunity for strong and comedic female performances to not just shine, but sparkle.
Mamma Mia! runs at Theatre Memphis through March 29th.