A more apt title for “Mamma Mia!” – the Broadway-bound musical from London that uses the songs of ABBA – might be “Money, Money, Money.”
With just a little more than a month to go before it begins previews at the Winter Garden, “Mamma Mia!” has racked up advance ticket sales of nearly $25 million, production sources said this week.
“Miss Saigon” still holds the record for the largest advance in Broadway history – $37 million by the time it opened in March 1991.
But “Mamma Mia!” – which has a top ticket price of $100 – is selling at such a clip, it could break “Saigon’s” record by the time it bows Oct. 18.
Granted, a multimillion-dollar advance is no guarantee of success. If a show opens to poor reviews and then gets hit with bad word of mouth, it can gobble up its advance very quickly to cover weekly losses.
“Saturday Night Fever,” for example, opened with $15 million in the bank – and went on to lose nearly all its $10 million investment.
But if history is any guide, that is not going to happen to “Mamma Mia!”
Wherever this show goes, it earns great notices and generates tremendous buzz and repeat business.
Set on a Greek Island, “Mamma Mia!” tells the slight but sweet story of a soon-to-be-wed young woman who is trying to figure out which of her mother’s three ex-lovers is her father.
Hit ABBA tunes like “Dancing Queen,” “The Winner Takes It All” and “Super Trouper” are cheekily shoehorned into the plot.
Nobody was paying much attention to “Mamma Mia!” when it quietly began previews two years ago in London.
But within days of those first performances, the box office exploded, raking in about 500,000 pounds ($750,000) a day, says the show’s producer, Judy Craymer.
“People had a good time, and they told their friends,” she says.
After the critics raved, “Mamma Mia!” became London’s hottest ticket (it’s still a sellout), and recouped its $4.5 million startup costs in less than a year.
Normally, when a show hits in London, it travels quickly to Broadway.
But Craymer and ABBA – who crashed and burned on Broadway in the 1980s with the flop musical “Chess” – were gun-shy about putting their cheerfully silly show before the New York critics.
So they decided to open in Toronto first and tour the United States before coming into New York.
“Broadway is a very expensive testing ground, and we wanted to create word of mouth before trying our luck here,” says Craymer.
A lot of theater experts thought she was making a big mistake.
ABBA, they said, was not popular enough in America to justify a pre-Broadway tour, and if “Mamma Mia!” was going to be a successful franchise, it had to make a splash in New York first.
But the experts were wrong.
The Toronto production, which was supposed to run a few months, is now in its second year and has recouped its startup costs.
Craymer put together another company to tour the United States.
That production has broken box-office records in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.
It opened to raves in Boston two weeks ago, where last week it grossed nearly $900,000 at the Colonial Theater, yet another record.
On tour, “Mamma Mia!” performs very much as it did in London.
The show usually comes to a town with an “acceptable advance,” says Craymer, and then, once previews begin, sales skyrocket.
Dee Hoty, who stars in the national tour, says, “There’s always good buzz in previews, and then, when the critics validate us and say, ‘Go have fun, you’ll love it,’ the actual firestorm ignites.”
Demand is so great for “Mamma Mia!” that Craymer is going to send out yet another U.S. touring company before the end of the year.
There is also a hugely successful production in Australia.
“It’s become an industry,” Craymer says.
“We started off with a handful of employees in London, and now there are literally hundreds of people working on the show around the world. My life is a constant well of e-mails.”
If “Mamma Mia!” is a hit on Broadway, where its capitalization is nearly $10 million, it probably will join “Cats,” “Les Miserables” and “The Phantom of the Opera” as one of the most financially successful shows of all time.
Broadway insiders say it is entirely possible that “Mamma Mia!” will eventually post worldwide profits of hundreds of millions of dollars.
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Duly noted: “Chicago” plays its 2,000th performance Saturday night, making it the longest-running revival in Broadway history . . . Jeffrey Denman and Jamie Laverdiere will alternate in the role of Leo Bloom in “The Producers” while Matthew Broderick takes off from Sept. 4 to 9. Brad Oscar will fill in for Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock from Sept. 18 to 23.
