What Would Muriel Think?

In an upstairs library at the quietly posh Covent Garden Hotel, Bjorn Ulvaeus is trying to convince a skeptical reporter that “Mamma Mia!”--the hit London musical that uses 22 ABBA songs to tell an original mother-daughter tale of cross-generational love on the eve of a Greek island wedding--is really all about the story.

“I hope that people halfway into the first act start forgetting these are ABBA songs,” says Ulvaeus, who shows up early for the interview dressed not in a ruffled shirt or bell bottoms, but in head-to-toe black. His deep side part is the only evidence that this bearded, mild-mannered, mineral water-drinking man of 55 is, in fact, one of the members of the legendary pop band.

In this musical, opening Feb. 26 at L.A.’s Shubert Theatre, Sophie is a 20-year-old bride-to-be who invites three of her single mother’s old boyfriends to the wedding, hoping to find her long-lost father in time to give her away. She sings “Honey, Honey” while giggling over her mother’s diary with a pair of friends. “Take a Chance on Me” is given an Ethel Merman-ish turn by one of her mother’s randy middle-aged girlfriends on the make, who bond over “Chiquitita” in another scene. A whole Greek chorus sings “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do.”

In a book by British playwright and television writer Catherine Johnson, the characters are not practitioners of the sincerest form of flattery, like Bjorn Again, the most notable of the ABBA cover bands. Or the ABBA-crazy heroine of the 1994 film “Muriel’s Wedding”; or the lip-syncing drag queens in 1994’s “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” the projects that unearthed ABBA from our pop culture subconscious and had us once again singing “Dancing Queen” in our dreams.

Those offbeat Australian films married high camp and gay culture with ABBA worship. “Mamma Mia!” opts for only the shyest homosexual side plot, with an ironic sensibility that amounts to little more than a show-long wink that we are all in on the joke. For the characters in “Mamma Mia!” have appropriated the songs to illustrate the plot twists of a mainstream West End musical.

But then, no one can really take away the songs of ABBA from Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid “Frida” Lyngstad. Not Sophie or her mother. Not Bjorn Again or Muriel or the drag queens. Not even Bjorn himself. Yes, the songs have been snugly fit into the beginning, middle and end of this sentimental journey. But forget they’re ABBA songs? Come on, Bjorn, that’s impossible!

“It is?” he demurs, and chuckles his slow, quiet Santa’s chuckle. “Well, that’s my theory, because I forget. The idea was not to change the original lyrics, but to weave a story around that. When we finally decided let’s go ahead, the idea was that the story’s more important than the songs. We have to be really cruel, and whatever doesn’t fit the story goes, however big a hit. We didn’t squeeze in ‘Fernando,’ because there was no place for it. There’s no room for ‘Waterloo.’ We cut ‘Summer Night City’ after the first previews because we wanted to get quicker into the story.”

“Mamma Mia!” opened in London’s West End on April 6, 1999, 25 years to the day after ABBA won the Eurovision song contest in Brighton, England, for “Waterloo.” Billed as “the musical they never knew they’d written,” “Mamma Mia!” broke box office records and made back its $3.5-million investment in only six months.

“I thought during rehearsals: ‘This is quite good. This is entertaining,’ ” Ulvaeus says, speaking with a proper English accent. “But no one had a clue that people would laugh so much.”

The reviews, however, were mixed. The Financial Times’ Alistair Macaulay began his review by admitting his fondness for Shirley Temple movies and “. . . herewith vanishes my social life--by the fact that I actually enjoyed ‘Mamma Mia!’ ” The Independent called it “ridiculously enjoyable.” But the Hollywood Reporter called it “a banal, cliche-ridden story . . . all terribly silly,” before acknowledging it was “infectious fun.”

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The ABBA revival has been going on so long now that it is hard to remember that desert of time--the 1980s--when ABBA was all but forgotten, having broken up in 1981. “ABBA was running out of energy; we didn’t have as much fun in the studio as we used to,” Ulvaeus says. “We felt: Nothing much more to give here.” Married couple Bjorn and Frida had already broken up in 1978, and Benny and Agnetha would split up as well in 1981, although all remained friends (Frida is a small investor in “Mamma Mia!”).

Ulvaeus and Andersson wanted to try something new and looked to the early musicals of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, such as “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita.” “We were inspired by that, and toward the end of the ABBA period, we had gotten tired of the three-minute format,” Ulvaeus says.

Rice, it turned out, was an ABBA fan and collaborated with the songwriters on the musical “Chess,” which opened in 1986, a success in London but a Broadway failure. It was London-based executive producer Judy Craymer who would hatch the idea that a musical could be made around the already hummable catalog of hit ABBA songs, with their accessible lyrics and universal boy-girl themes.

But Ulvaeus and Andersson’s next project was “Kristina From Duvemala,” a musical based on the famous Swedish novel about a Swede who moves to America in the 1850s. A success that has been running since opening in Stockholm in 1995, it is now being translated into English.

Nevertheless, Craymer kept alive the idea for the musical. “Bjorn and Benny were encouraging, but they weren’t that interested and neither was the rest of the world,” said Craymer by phone. “The story had to be right.”

After unsuccessfully trying a few writers, Craymer found Johnson in 1997. In a phone interview from her home in Bristol, England, the playwright said she used the songs as a starting point for the story--reading the lyrics, not listening to the music. “The songs had to be used in an organic way,” Johnson said. “It’s not an ABBA tribute or the story of ABBA. I wasn’t thinking about ABBA.”

Johnson, 43, said that the mother-daughter story line was a way to incorporate the emotional time curve of the songs. Explains Ulvaeus: “ ‘Honey, Honey’ is a teenage sort of thing, isn’t it? A lot of them were like that at the beginning of the ABBA period--and gradually they became more mature, as I got a better grasp of the language and felt, you know, that I didn’t have to write rubbish, I could actually say something.”

Ulvaeus, who is also a producer, has been very hands-on, from picking cast members to training the actors to sing pop songs--disabusing them of their theatrical vibratos, teaching them to let go of their notes sooner and pay close attention to the beat.

“What you hear in the show is actually exactly how we sang it, how we played it,” Ulvaeus says. “Every note everyone plays has been written down carefully from listening to the tracks. I think people can hear that it’s different voices, but it sounds right.”

Maybe, but not all die-hard ABBA fans will delight in a jazzy theater-orchestra medley of hit songs before the curtain comes up.

And “Money, Money, Money” and “S.O.S.” sung by a musical cast doesn’t sound the same as your “ABBA Gold” LP. Audiences everywhere giggle each time one of the hits is introduced into the plot. “But funnily enough, only for a couple of seconds,” Ulvaeus points out, “then they’re back into the story again.”

Director Phyllida Lloyd said in a phone interview from London that the self-conscious play between dialogue and song that always exists in musicals is especially heightened here. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding pretentious,” Lloyd said, “but ‘Mamma Mia!’ is actually quite Brechtian in calling attention to form and the relationship the audience develops with characters onstage. Of course the audience is waiting to hear their favorite songs and wondering what the hell is going to come next, and that’s part of it. I’m really not trying to say this is going to change the world. This is just good fun.”

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Ulvaeus has learned from experience that success in London doesn’t guarantee fans on the other side of the pond. He gets visibly miffed when thinking back to the New York Times review that he blames for ruining “Chess’ ” chances for success on Broadway in the 1980s. It was that experience that informed the decision to start “Mamma Mia!” in less cutthroat territory. “I didn’t dare go into Broadway straight away,” Ulvaeus says, “because I had a nightmare with ‘Chess’ all those years ago.” Instead, they chose Toronto, where “Mamma Mia!” opened in the spring of last year, to similarly mixed reviews and box-office-record success. A permanent company was formed to stay on in Toronto.

Until “Mamma Mia!” had its U.S. premiere in San Francisco in November, the producers had worried there might not be enough of a fan base to make the show the phenomenon it had been in London and Toronto. “America was the one place around the globe really where ABBA didn’t take off in the same way,” Ulvaeus says, “because of the competition in America, and because those groups were on the road all the time.”

There weren’t any bad surprises in San Francisco. Tickets sold, and the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Fondly remembered pop songs jiggled into a fizzy love-and-marriage story is the simple secret of ‘Mamma Mia!’s’ success. Musical theater folks may come away wondering why a better book, choreography and scenery couldn’t figure into the formula.” The San Jose Mercury News wrote that “the chosen songs don’t always serve the story” and that “as a result, ‘Mamma Mia!’ can come off as little more than a cheeky video-age revue disguised as musical theater.” The San Francisco Examiner called it “a fun evening” despite the weak plot. The show has set records at the Orpheum Theatre, for example, grossing nearly $1 million for the week ending Feb. 4.

The producers seem willing to take a little criticism, so long as the audience keeps coming, next week in Los Angeles, and in Boston, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia, and, indeed, to Broadway when it opens in October. In Europe, Ulvaeus says, the producers hope to start in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, “but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t travel all around Europe,” he says.

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Despite their plans for global domination with “Mamma Mia!,” members of ABBA have been quite modest about turning down the wild propositions of those trying to make a buck from their throngs of still-devoted fans, including a $1-billion offer to reunite last year.

“People would be so disappointed,” Ulvaeus says, lowering his voice to a whisper. “There is no way they couldn’t be, if four 50-year-olds--over 50--got on stage such a long time after and tried to do the same thing. It would be so pathetic--I’m sure.”

Ulvaeus says that for him, reliving the past can be painful--at least from a fashion perspective. “It’s terrible,” he says with a smile. “When I see old pictures from ‘75, when I thought the more outrageous you can be, the better--you know, a sequined leotard in blue--I cringe. What they’re wearing onstage in ‘Mamma Mia!’ is not by far the worst ones we had.”

In addition to supervising “Mamma Mia!” and the translation of “Kristina,” Ulvaeus says he has plans for an all-new version of “Chess.” “We’ll probably start with that in Sweden, as a tryout, and if it goes well, then we can spread out again. After that, hopefully Benny and I have another musical in us.”

Craymer said that the musical began as a film idea, and Ulvaeus says he has had plenty of those Hollywood conversations. But because the musical has done so well, he plans to keep Hollywood waiting for now.

“I do think that it’s better for a musical to live its life first,” he says, “because if you see it on the screen, would you like to go to the theater after that? Probably not. You’ve seen it. And that’s the mystery of a musical that hasn’t been filmed. You’re bloody meant to go there and buy your ticket. Musicals are a wonderful thing these days with Napster and MP3 on the Net and everything. People have to go and buy their ticket and sit in the dark and watch.”

And listen. And thank them, at least, for the music.

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“Mamma Mia!” opens Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. at the Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Regular times: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. No performance Feb. 27. Ends May 12. $40-$70. (800) 447-7400.