Walnut Street Theatre presents 'Mamma Mia!'

Consider me a firm member of the latter group. I somehow managed to entirely avoid this high-octane, pastel-tinged monstrosity during its 14-year stand on Broadway, and I’ve never seen the 2008 film adaptation either. (A sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, releases July 20, 2018). My blissful ignorance ended in a wash of ABBA's earsplitting Scandinavian synthesizer music.

Jukebox junk

“How can I resist you?” the inane lyrics of Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus ask. Pretty damn easily, I reply.

Though it might peg me as the tightest of tight-asses to some, I can state without hesitation that Mamma Mia! represents just about everything I associate with the steady decline of artistic standards in commercial theater. The story, lifted liberally from the 1968 film Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, serves little function other than to introduce the shoehorned ABBA songbook.

No character achieves anything close to three-dimensionality, although finding oneself emerges as a nominal theme. Catherine Johnson’s libretto contains enough cheap jokes and stale innuendo to make a third-grader groan.

Richard Stafford’s staging doubles down on the show’s most garish elements. The Mediterranean setting, designed by Peter Barbieri and lit by Jack Mehler, looks more like a second-rate tiki restaurant than an island paradise. Most of the characters — alleged natives included — speak with bland American accents, as if to signal that one shouldn’t get too invested in the story. No danger there.

The choreography (also by Stafford) puts the perky young ensemble front and center, to the point where they often obstruct the nominal main characters during production numbers. Even during supposedly intimate moments — like the prologue, where bride-to-be Sophie Sheridan (Laura Giknis) summons her three potential fathers to her impending nuptials — you can still spot a dancer or two grapevining in the background.

Highlights and lowlights

The incongruous presence of extraneous bodies onstage adds to the evening’s concert feel — except that, in a concert setting, there’s no need to keep up the false pretense of narrative storytelling.

At least the ensemble is talented. Lyn Philistine especially stands out as drily humorous divorcée Tanya. Her easily commanding demeanor and sparkling voice deserve better.

Charis Leos and Christopher Sutton’s Rosie and Bill make a charmingly odd couple in “Take a Chance on Me,” and Jonas Cohen adds a level of pathos to his underwritten character, Harry Bright. Eric Kunze cuts a dashing figure as the show’s romantic lead, Sam Carmichael, although his solo number, “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” doesn’t sit comfortably in his vocal range.

Unfortunately, the central performances flounder. Anne Brummel lacks charisma and grit as Donna, Sophie’s fiercely independent ex-singer mother. Giknis comes across like Kristin Chenoweth’s more annoying, less talented kid sister. As her intended, Sky, Schyler Conaway seems more interested in his hunky groomsmen than his fiancé.

As the show’s second act moves fleetly toward its resolution, it mostly drops the illusion of plot; the curtain call, an ABBA singalong, makes a logical conclusion. The great irony is that the musical takes place in Greece, the birthplace of theater. It’s also, apparently, where drama goes to die.