Tanya Chesham-Leigh (Christine Baranski), Donna Sheridan (Meryl Streep) and Rosie Rice (Julie Walters) in Mamma Mia!.
Photo courtesy of Universal Studios.
You’d think the producers of Mamma Mia! would have seized the chance to serve up a non-stop disco party. How can a musical built around 22 ABBA hits fail to make every last audience member jump up and be a Dancing Queen? Alas, the film is drawing mostly tepid reviews, and the reason is not Meryl Streep’s lusty singing or the sun-drenched shots of Greece or the cheerfully lightweight but surprisingly well-rigged plot. The only serious letdown in the movie, and a fatal one, is the dancing.
You don’t have to be a triple-threat with a triple pirouette these days to make a big impact on the silver screen. Think of Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine: It’s the climactic dance numbers—Napoleon’s Jon Heder flexing his tush to the first disco synthesizer ping; Little Miss Sunshine’s pudgy, bespectacled Abigail Breslin strutting through an absurd burlesque routine in a kiddie beauty pageant—that make them over-the-top memorable. Movement in the movies doesn’t have to be slick or out-of-character to burn a booty-shaking image on our brains.
It’s baffling, then, that the team behind Mamma Mia! seems to go to such lengths to avoid dancing, whether conspicuously choreographed or naturalistic and spontaneous. In taking the choreography from stage to film, original Broadway choreographer Anthony Van Laast doesn’t seem to have adapted his steps so much as to have obliterated them. In the “Dancing Queen” number, the whole Greek village following Streep merely run through the streets, then arrive on the island pier only to do a little half-hearted hand-shuffle for maybe eight bars of music.
For Mamma Mia, Streep mostly rolls around on a roof like a restless dog. In “Lay All Your Love on Me,” a gang of bachelor-party buddies storms back out to the pier, do a few frog-like leg stomps, and mysteriously lose their mojo. In “Voulez-Vous,” we get a half-second flash of dancers doing pirouettes—reportedly the ensemble cast was drawn largely from the Broadway musical—and then we’re back to jumping up and down, as though that tiny hint of theatrical dancing were some blip to be covered up lest the audience realize—gasp!—they’re watching a musical.
Van Laast once told Dance Magazine that, for a music video, you don’t need steps, “you just need an editor, and dancers jumping.” He seems to have followed that credo here, and the result is continual viewer frustration. He’s also said “The challenge for me was to make the choreography narrative-based and character-driven, so that it appears to be improvised and spontaneous.” He has succeeded only in making it virtually non-existent. He should have more faith in the fascinating movement that even non-dance-trained people suddenly produce when they bust out of their inhibitions.
I suppose I see a bit of the logic in Van Laast’s strategy: save the really silly dancing for the moments in which it seems “realistic,” like when Streep and her two gal pals restage their old “Donna and the Dynamos” act. But this is a film in which people bust out singing ABBA songs. It’s delicious because it isn’t realistic. The dance numbers in Mamma Mia could have been winking all over the place. Instead, by the time the closing credits finally let Streep and gang let loose in glittery spandex, it’s far too late.
Rachel Howard is the dance correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her website is www.rachelhoward.com.
