A highly successful musical, Mamma Mia! draws record earnings whenever staged around the world. Now fans can look forward to the film version, with plenty of Abba’s music and A-List Hollywood stars.

THE 007 stage at Pinewood Studios is jumping; Abba’s 1979 hit Voulez-Vous belting out high-tempo, glitzy Swedish pop music and rattling the bones of anyone within earshot.

Outside, it is a typically British summer’s day; inside the James Bond stage is currently dressed in the warm and cosy clothing of a bright Greek Taverna, playing host to the set of Mamma Mia!, the big-screen adaptation of the hit Broadway musical.

The northern end of the studio is draped in a lightweight blue canvas, punctured by thousands of tiny light bulbs, miniscule impostors mimicking the twinkling stars, while below is a thick brick wall that overlooks an imaginary sea. Sprawling down the studio stretches a large Mediterranean homestead, a small hillock cresting the southern arches, buildings standing tall and neat on three of the four sides, while all around glides a swirling troupe of scantily-clad dancers.

“You know what,” beams the film’s production designer, Maria Djurkovic, during a break in the thundering music, “really this stage isn’t big enough for what we wanted to do.” Which, given the size of the stage — and the fact that it regularly plays host to the high-octane hi-jinks of Britain’s most famous spy — only adds to the sense of scale. This is a super-sized production.
“Of course, mounting a film production is very different from the stage show,” chimes producer Judy Craymer, who developed the stage musical with the Abba duo Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, and who is now overseeing its cinematic interpretation.

“But we’re working with the same director, Phyllida Lloyd, who did such a good job directing the show, and of course Benny and Bjorn have been involved all along.”

As Benny and Bjorn again make their presence felt at Pinewood — the music picking up, and Voulez-Vous once more ringing around the stage — the dancers begin to spin around stationary cameras, hand in hand, while dotted among them, grinning broadly, go a cluster of famous faces: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters, Colin Firth and Stellen Skarsgard, each one of these distinguished players a leading character in the film.

The characters that they play mirror those in Craymer’s stage show, with 22-year-old Amanda Seyfried starring as Sophie, the bride-to-be who bids to discover the identity of her father by inviting the three potential candidates to her wedding — Sam, Harry and Bill, played by Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgard — and who, by doing so, whips up an emotional maelstrom for her single mother, Donna, played by Streep, and Donna’s two best friends, Tanya and Rosie, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters.

“Getting Meryl Streep to play Donna was so exciting,” continues Craymer.

“Meryl has such a lovely singing voice, too, and of course she sang quite recently on camera, on Robert Altman’s last film, A Prairie Home Companion. And when you look at the three men, what better bunch than Pierce, Colin and Stellen. They perhaps don’t all have the same musical and dancing abilities, but that’s a good thing!”