Singing Queen

Louise Pitre rears back in the chair in her dressing room at the Shubert Theatre, hooting with glee as she recalls one of the reviews of “Mamma Mia!”--well, actually it was a review of her hair. “They wrote something about ‘this very expensive silver wig’--I couldn’t believe it. Expensive?! Yeah, actually, I’ve had a rough life. Ha! I’m proud of this hair, I’ve earned it!”

Pitre quit dyeing her hair six years ago, freely admits her age--44--and confesses, without much prodding, that she’s never been the world’s biggest fan of the ‘70s pop band ABBA. So what’s she doing in “Mamma Mia!” dressed in a lime-green sparkle jumpsuit and belting out “Waterloo” six nights a week?

Getting ready for Broadway, that’s what.

In February, the day after “Mamma Mia!,” the musical featuring 22 ABBA songs, opened in Los Angeles, Pitre invited the “Mamma” company to her dressing room, hoisted a glass of champagne and announced the big news--she’d be leaving the road company midway through its Chicago run to star in the Broadway production when it opens at the Winter Garden Theatre in October.

It’s easy to see why. Pitre plays Donna, a fiercely independent single mother running an inn on a Greek island. At her daughter’s wedding, she’s forced to confront her past when three men, any of which might be father of the bride. In Donna’s wild and crazy days, she and her two best friends had a rock band, which gives the now-middle-aged ex-bandmates an excuse to trot out their old costumes and sing “Super Trouper” and “Dancing Queen.” Catchy numbers, to be sure, but it’s not until midway through the second act, when Pitre rips the plaster off the ceiling with two back-to-back ballads that “Mamma Mia!” finds its soul and audiences discover this better-late-than-never star in the making. After Pitre hits the final high note on “Winner Takes It All,” only a tone-deaf robot would question her ability to command a Broadway stage.

Then again, Pitre never takes anything for granted.

Pitre auditioned in March last year for the role in Toronto, where the national touring company was launched after its 1999 world premiere in London. “They asked me to prepare ‘Money Money’ and ‘Mamma Mia!’ They’re fun numbers in the show, but to walk into an audition room and stand in front of a panel of people, Jesus, that’s not what I’d pick!” But that third tune was right up Pitre’s alley. “ ‘Winner Takes It All’--that’s something I can stand on the stage and sing. I treat it like much more of a heart kind of song. It’s got stuff. You can do something with that.”

So Pitre must have known she got the gig when she finished “Winner,” right? “No,” Pitre says softly, suddenly meek. “I never do that anymore. You set yourself up for too many disappointments. You never know; maybe they’re going to want it super poppy and if that’s the case, then it’s not for me.”

Before her fourth callback, Pitre says the producers told her she was their No. 1 choice. “I’m wondering, what does that mean? They sort of like me the best, they think, but come in again? That was weird. So I went again and sat down in front of a huge panel, and the director said, ‘We would like you to be our Donna,’ and you know what I did? I got up from behind the table and I went: ‘Excuse me for a second. Aaaaaiiiiieeeee!’ ”

Pitre reenacts the moment, leaping out of her chair, squealing while she runs a quick lap around her dressing room. “Then I came back to my chair. ‘OK, we’ll talk,’ ” Pitre says, feigning a Christine Baranski-like moment as she pretends to puff coolly on a cigarette. “They all burst out laughing. I’d never been told before like that. How nice is that!”

Even nicer were the “this is a hit” vibes Pitre felt the first time she performed “Mamma Mia!” in front of a live audience. “Did I realize we were on to something? Oh, my God, yes,” she says, laughing. “It was quite amazing.

“Let’s face it: You do a lot of shows over the years, some are great, some are not so great, some are pretty well awful. Oftentimes you’re doing a show you think is really good and they’re not coming to see it, or they don’t seem to get it, or, just because it’s a depressing story doesn’t mean you can’t be thrilled about it. But this show? I’ve been in this business for 20 years and I have never had a reaction like this so consistently.

“This is not a life-changing experience, folks, it ain’t Shakespeare, and nobody’s saying it is. It’s a dumb-grin kind of show. It goes like a train, this thing. It just builds and builds and builds and then gives them that sort of extra bang for your buck, I guess, and that shoots it through the ceiling, and they all have those grins on their faces and they’re all clapping and yelling at us,” Pitre says with wonderment. “I just can’t get over that. The old ones in the cast keep telling the young ones in the cast, ‘Enjoy this, enjoy this, you have no idea--you should be reveling in this because you know,’ ” Pitre laughs huskily, “ ‘It’s all downhill from here!’ ”

*

Pitre’s star turn in “Mamma Mia!” is one of those out-of-the-blue breakthroughs that prompts the question: Where has this woman been?

The answer: Canada.

“To be honest, I have no desire to be a famous person,” explains Pitre when asked why she didn’t spend her 20s pursuing a career in New York. “I’d like to be rich. I just don’t want to be famous, and I like my quality of life. It’s all about living well, and eating well, and drinking well, that’s what matters to me--clothes, food and wine, OK? That’s what matters!”

In Toronto, Pitre was happily ensconced in her second marriage, to actor Joe Matheson, and a lucrative career performing solo concerts and musicals. “I very slowly, steadily made my way in this business,” she says. “One step at a time. It’s been a very slow, steady climb.”

It all started with Marlene Dietrich. Pitre was raised in a French-speaking family in Ontario and went to a bilingual high school near Niagara Falls. She had planned on a sensible career as a high school music teacher, but that changed the minute Pitre landed a role in a revue while studying at the University of Western Ontario. “It was a silly little show,” says Pitre, suddenly breaking into song and crooning “We’re in the Money.” “But, oh, my--I had to do this Marlene Dietrich bit, and I just fell in love with it, and there you go, so much for teaching music.”

Pitre moved to Toronto in 1980, landed a day job as a typist and started performing at weddings, bar mitzvahs and industry shows.

By 1990, Pitre had become a fixture in Toronto’s theater community. She played Fantene in the Montreal, Toronto and Paris productions of “Les Miserables” and creatively hit her peak with “Piaf,” portraying the Parisian street urchin-turned-chanteuse in three separate productions beginning in 1992.

Pitre still regards Piaf’s tragic life and bittersweet ballads as a source of inspiration. “Every new man was the love of her life and, oh, my, there were many of them. She lived too full out for anybody to keep up with her. When Piaf died, she was 47, but she looked like she was 95, I swear: She looked ancient, so beaten up, her poor body. But let me tell you, Piaf lived 250% every day of her life, and I’m sure she’s the kind of person who’d say, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’ And I find that one of the most attractive things to me in life: someone who goes, ‘This is the way I wanna do it and I won’t regret anything.’ ” Pitre juts out her jaw defiantly and declares, “ ‘Non, je n’ais regret rien. I regret nothing.’ The songs are desperate, and so strong, and there’s no end to the depth of what she feels. When you sing those songs, you feel like you’re just saving the world, or you could if only they would listen.”

As it turned out, immersing herself in Piaf’s brand of French soul music primed Pitre for “Winner Takes It All,” eight years later. At the first “Mamma Mia!” run-through, Pitre remembers getting the thumbs-up from Benny Anderson, who wrote the ABBA hits with partner Bjorn Ulvaeus. “Benny pulled me aside and told me when they first wrote the song, they tried to write some dummy French lyrics, it just didn’t work; that went out the window. Then he said, ‘Hearing you sing it, I feel the French, the Jacques Brel, the Piaf, and that’s what it’s supposed to be,’ and I went ‘Oh, my God! Yeah!’ ”

Pitre owned the Donna role from the get-go, confirms Ulvaeus, who adds that he never even considered asking Pitre to tone down her prematurely gray locks. “No, no, no, no, no--remember, we’re Europeans,” Ulvaeus says wryly. Speaking by phone from his home in Sweden, Ulvaeus elaborates: “What I’m saying is, the qualities people have as actresses and as singers, all of that comes long before the idea that they have to be looking exactly like some ideal. Forget that; this is not a soap.”

In fact, the idea of having mature women take center stage was a plus when “Mamma Mia!” book writer Catherine Johnson first pitched Ulvaeus her narrative device to transform 22 ABBA hits into a musical. “One of the things that attracted me when Catherine told me her story idea was the fact that for once, you could portray three women between 40 and 50, and they’re the main characters--that attracted me immensely, and it happens very seldom.”

Pitre argues that when it comes to selling a song, there’s nothing like having a few hard knocks to draw on. “The typical thing would be to cast a bunch of 25-year-olds in these roles as the three Dynamos; you see it all the time, and it’s frustrating,” she says. “I don’t want to see some 20-year-old telling me about what hurts in life.” Addressing the imaginary ingenue, Pitre says, “You haven’t felt a thing yet! How do you know? You don’t! And I don’t believe you. And I don’t care. What have you lived?’ I want to hear from people who have got something to say. In film too, if you see a scene with a Robert Duvall, you see the difference between the young whippersnapper and this person who’s got stuff.” She pauses. “You know. Life. Weight.”

*

The hallway to Pitre’s dressing room is lined with posters from all the Broadway divas who’ve taken their hits on the road to L.A.’s Shubert. Jennifer Holliday, Angela Lansbury, Stephanie Mills. It may be premature to put Pitre in that category, or to tag “Winner Takes It All” as the “Memories” for the new millennium. But whatever happens in New York, Pitre’s determined to enjoy her unexpected break while she can. On her dressing-room table, next to an ancient eight-track of ABBA hits mailed to her by some fans, Pitre keeps a fifth of whiskey for the crew right next to a bottle of wine that she shares with her dressers every Sunday night during her final costume change.

Pitre’s possessions are in storage in Toronto. A 3-foot-high poster of her dog Tasha is on the floor. It all seems a bit surreal to the barefoot actress who spent her disco years listening to Earth Wind and Fire. As she turns to the makeup mirror to prepare for another night of “Mamma Mia!,” Pitre muses, “Who . . . would’ve thought an ABBA show would turn out to be like the perfect thing for me? It’s very odd. Very odd. If you’d asked me what would be the thing that would take me to Broadway, I never would’ve come up with this. But it is. I can infuse some of the stuff that’s really deep inside me and it works, it belongs here.”

She continues, “I never wanted to go to New York and knock on doors when no one knows you’re there, and I have no reason to be there. I guess secretly, to be totally honest, yes, I’ve always dreamed of going to Broadway, but I didn’t want to go unless I’m coming in the right way. Now this is the right way and I’ve waited a long time for it. But I’m ready, and I wouldn’t have been when I was 25. I know what I’m doing and I’m not scared. I don’t think they’ll say, ‘She stinks, why is she here?’ I can handle whatever happens when I get there.”

* “Mamma Mia!” at the Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends May 12. $40-$70. (800) 447-7400.