Mamma Mia, set to music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, is a decidedly different kind of whodunit, drenched in a bombastic pop score that demands you dance in the aisles (“Honey, Honey,” “Money, Money, Money,” “Dancing Queen,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” et al.). More than 70 million people have seen the show, which has grossed $4.5 billion worldwide since its 1999 debut, and its revival, freshly installed in the Winter Garden, didn’t exactly tiptoe back into town. Its seven previews raked in more than $1.5 million, and, in its first week on Broadway, it placed fourth among the top five earners (just behind Wicked, The Lion King and Hamilton).
British writer Catherine Johnson concocted the plot that pops up periodically between songs. It’s about a 20-year-old bride-to-be, born out of wedlock, who wants a father to walk down the aisle with her for her nuptials. She wants it so much that she investigates her mother’s diary from two decades back and invites the candidates most likely. They stretch over three continents: an American architect named Sam Carmichael, an Australian writer-adventurer named Bill Austin and a British banker named Harry Bright. Which one will the fountain bless? We never find out. Upstaged by more pressing nuptials, the paternity mystery is shoved aside and never solved.
The current revival holds it to just two continents, dropping the Australian accent altogether—which is a blessing for a Birmingham boy like actor Jim Newman. “When I got the script, Bill Austin was born and raised in America,” he tells Observer. “They stopped making him Australian on tours, I think, because there were so many bad Australian accents and they got laughs.”
Which is just fine with Newman. “When we give up acting school and come to New York, we think we’re going to play this great range of characters—but why?” he wonders. “Over the years, we learn that it’s better not to think you’re a completely different person. It’s better to look at this character and find parts of him that are like you. Then, you can decide how to react as Jim Newman if you’re living the life of this character. I think that makes it a lot easier, and also, I think it makes the character seem more honest to the audience. It’s all an adventure.”
For Newman, this adventure began in 1997. “That’s when I started working professionally in New York, doing terrible plays and a lot of bad Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway. A few years ago, I took up national touring (Big, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Kiss Me, Kate), and my body feels every year of that, believe me. I knew at some point I would have to pay the piper. Doing eight shows a week—especially as a singer-dancer—I knew that my body was going to take a toll.”
One night, after an Off-Broadway show he was doing, the stage manager came up to Newman and said, “Liza is waiting for you in her limo.” Of course, he thought he was kidding, but when he put on his backpack and started to leave, the stage manager said, “I was serious. Liza Minnelli was at the show tonight, and she wants to see you. She’s in her limousine.” When he went out the stage door, the limousine door opened, and she said, “Jimmy! Jimmy! Take me to dinner.” She took him to Sardi’s and said, “Next year I’m doing a show on Broadway at the Palace, where my mother made her big comeback. It’s all about my dad’s movies.” And a year later, he was at the Palace, standing on stage with his arms around this person who had become his friend, setting the lights for their duet. “It was a great experience for me. People have said to me, ‘This show is only about Liza and her boys in the chorus. You’re sort of back in the ensemble,’ and I say to them, ‘Some jobs you take to further your career. Some jobs you take for the experience. Liza is—Liza. There is no one like her and never will be. She’s such a huge part of our entertainment fabric.’”
“During the run, whenever there’d be stars in the green room after the show, Liza would come into my dressing room and say, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy! There’s somebody I want you to meet,’ and she’d take me into her dressing room. The door would open, and it would be Gregory Peck, sitting there with a cane, or Debbie Reynolds—incredible icons. It was really, really a major experience, and I’m so glad that I didn’t let my ego make that decision for me.”
The thing that Newman says he’s proudest of is his relationship with John Kander and Fred Ebb. “I grew up singing their songs, and they became friends of mine. They were just the best.”
His first Kander and Ebb was 1997’s Steel Pier, about the 1930s dance marathons, with Karen Ziemba, Daniel McDonald and Gregory Harrison. “It was my first contract, and my first original Broadway cast. Debra Monk was my love interest, and Kristin Chenoweth—it was her first Broadway show, too—was my wife. It changed my career—but it didn’t last four months.”
He also caught them at the tail end of their collaborations—in Over and Over, a 1999 musical that never made it in, despite a cast that included Dorothy Loudon and Mario Cantone. It was a beautiful score, but musicalizing Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth proved heavy lifting.
Ebb had died by the time his last musical with Kander—2007’s equally star-stuffed Curtains—came to Broadway. “Not having Fred there was a little sad because there is so much of him in that show,” Newman said. “He would have been so happy that it didn’t lie there, and it got produced. The reason they were such a successful team is because John is this hopeless romantic and Fred was this acerbic, hilarious, go-for-the-jugular sort of guy.”
Newman’s a great believer in affixing one’s own personality to the role at hand. “I’m that happy-go-lucky guy—the one at the party who’s first to take over the dance floor. I think that was always in my nature, even as a kid. I used those qualities to connect with my character, Bill Austin. This show is really about the women, let’s not kid anybody, and the men are brought in for the conflict, but if you’re any kind of actor, you’ll be able to find your story in that world.
“Bill has come to this wedding just thinking it’s going to be a party, and he’ll see some old friends. Then, he discovers he may have an adult daughter! At first, he doesn’t know what to make of that. But by the end of the play, he’s thinking, ‘You know what? I haven’t left any roots on this earth. It might be nice to have this beautiful, cool kid as the roots I leave behind.’”
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