Here we go again: 'Mamma Mia!' kicks off Winni Playhouse season that looks back, forward

MEREDITH — If you were the Winnipesaukee Playhouse, and you were approaching the first normal season since the pandemic, you’d be in the mood to party. As this year is also the 20th season for the playhouse, there’s also a sense of passing time.

The first show in the professional schedule, “Mamma Mia!,” attends to both of those sentiments. The show, which runs through July 8, is one the playhouse has produced before. These repeats are simultaneously a nod to the past and a look to the future, as they include novel approaches to what is, for some, familiar material.

Audience members coming to see “Mamma Mia!” will notice an immediate difference, as the show is utilizing a “thrust” configuration, a first for a professional production.

Timothy L'Ecuyer, who has taken the role of artistic director after the retirement of founder Neil Pankhurst, said "Mamma Mia!" was a natural choice for this arrangement, which features a stage that is both narrower and deeper, allowing for seating on three sides.

“The show is meant to be staged from all sides,” L’Ecuyer said. The thrust configuration provides for several distinct vantages for audience members — and for more audience members than usual, with room for around 250, as opposed to the usual capacity of 194.

“Mamma Mia!” isn’t one of the most decorated of titles, noted Chloe Kounadis, director, who said it has claim to exactly zero Tony Awards. But there are other ways to measure a show’s worth, and “Mamma Mia!” can boast claims few other titles can best. It’s one of the longest-running shows in the history of London’s West End, it has grossed more than $4 billion worldwide, and it has been seen by more than 65 million paying customers.

Award judges be damned; it’s a smash.

The last time the playhouse staged the show was in 2018. Just five years ago, but also a different era, as the experience of surviving a global pandemic has changed the emotional landscape. Add in the new theater configuration, and a nearly all-new cast — only one person from the 2018 production is involved in this show — and L’Ecuyer said there will be plenty of novelty, even for audience members who saw the first run.

“It can’t help but be different,” he said, “there’s different people working on it,” adding that it can be “fascinating” to see how different theater artists can find their own way to present common source material.

“Mamma Mia!,” with a large, ensemble cast, lends itself to such interpretation, said Kounadis, who is also choreographer for the show.

“There’s this built-in element of improv,” Kounadis said. There are specific stage notes in the book, of course, but there are also many party scenes, when actors are asked to guide their character through the space. This is where the thrust stage provides an advantage, because each audience member will have their own peek into the party.

The scenery itself will be something to behold. Melissa Shakun, an Emmy-winning art director and scenic designer, first developed set designs for the playhouse as a student. She has made it a yearly tradition to come back to Meredith to design a set, and for “Mamma Mia!,” she took inspiration from a recent vacation in Greece.

“Mamma Mia!” is a showcase of tunes by the beloved pop group ABBA, and many appreciate it as a chance to see a colorful stage full of talented singers and dancers perform these songs.

Kounadis, who knows the show better than most, said it could be easy to undervalue “Mamma Mia!” She certainly did, when she was a young “musical theater snob,” as she put it. “The completely original musicals were up on a pedestal for me,” and she considered the biopics and so-called “jukebox” musicals to be in a lesser class.

She had to confront this bias when she was cast in the role of Ali for the 2016-17 national tour. She performed it more than 300 times, to audiences in all corners of the country, during a period when communities were reeling from a divisive national election season.

“Mamma Mia!” is driven by a character’s desire to identify her father. However, throughout the show, it’s the chosen kind of family — friends, neighbors, former band members — that hold the group together.

“The show ends when we don’t have answers to the really big question,” Kounadis said.

Musical director Braden Chudzik said he chooses to appreciate the trees that make up a forest.

“Musical theater for me has always been about the moments,” Chudzik said. “This cast will never be together again, doing this show, in this location ... For me, if an audience member can come away from this with a moment [to remember], that is what I want to do.”

Lesley Pankhurst, patron and company services director, said the show has an ability to hide some emotional depth beneath the string of Scandinavian pop hits. “Nobody remembers that there’s a whole section that makes you weep because of the mother-daughter relationship,” she said.

Koudanis said people who come to “Mamma Mia!” for a single reason will walk out with more than they bargained for.

“I think you should come for music that you love, and for a show that has a lot of heart, and for some surprises along the way,” Koudanis said.

Visit winnipesaukeeplayhouse.org for ticket and showtime information.

Balancing old and new

L’Ecuyer said that before he retired, Neil Pankhurst built a season paying tribute to the first 20 years of the playhouse, yet did so in a way that would allow his successors to tread new creative ground.

“The three pieces we’re revisiting in the 2023 professional season are ‘Mamma Mia!,’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘Driving Miss Daisy.’” While “Mamma Mia!” was done within recent memory, the other two reach back to the early years. Regardless, several momentous things have happened in the interim, including a global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #MeToo reckoning.

“Any good production of a ‘classic’ also meets the moment in which it is performed and we are excited to do that with these.”

L’Ecuyer continued, “‘Menagerie’ and ‘Daisy’ themselves are also both plays with an acute awareness of time. The former looks back and the latter moves rapidly, rapidly forward through it. In ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ Tennessee Williams wrote, ‘Time is the longest distance between two places.’”