Mamma Mia! in Sweden
The ABBA musical have come home

Mamma Mia have come to Sweden - the home of ABBA.

Photo: Martin Skoog.

Lighting Musical Published: 14 January 2006
Since it's world premiere on London’s West End in 1999, the musical Mamma Mia! has been a big hit all around the World. With a story of “A mother, A daughter, 3 possible dads, And a trip down the aisle you'll never forget!” and 22 famous ABBA songs, the musical is loved by the audiences.

In February 2005 have the musical come to the home country of ABBA, Stockholm in Sweden. For the first time the Swedish people have the chance to hear the beloved ABBA songs, by Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Stig Andersson, in the Swedish language.

Lighting Design
The British Lighting Designer Howard Harrison designs the lighting for the original production of Mamma Mia. He has fine-tuned the lighting on every new production.
In Stockholm Howard had help from the Associate Lighting Designer Pia Virolainen. Pia comes from Finland, but she work with lighting on theatre and musical in Germany. Before the Stockholm production she have work with Mamma Mia on the German productions in Hamburg & Stuttgart, the Dutch production in Utrecht and an international tour.

“Howard's design on this show is a carefully balanced combination of rather naturalistic scenes during very different times of the day on our little Greek island on the one hand and of exactly choreographed "show" numbers, of which the rather large moving light rig and the led floor are a big part”, explains Pia. “The general look of the lighting design, as of the whole show, is a very clean and simple one, which of course is one of the hardest things to do without starting to be boring.”

Pia, have Howard lighting design for Mamma Mia evolved?
”The lighting design of the show has changed quite a bit since the original London production - 6 years is a long time! Mamma Mia is not your traditional copy and paste show in any parts of the production and the lighting design has developed accordingly accomodating the creative input of us associates as well as loads of new ideas Howard has been coming up with. Gimme Gimme Gimme for example became a whole new look in Sweden, which we now are putting into the other productions in Europe.”

Programming
Marcus Körmer is the Head Programmer for the Stockholm production of Mamma Mia. Marcus is a Lighting Designer and Programmer from Germany. He has work with Mamma Mia in Hamburg & Stuttgart.

Marcus, have the lighting control of Mamma Mia! change during the years?
“Yes. As far as I know, the original version was done in 1999 on a Strand for the conventional part of the system and an Vari-Lite Artisan for the Moving lights. Nowadays there are many different versions all over the world including Combinations of Vari-Lite Virtuoso/ETC Obsession, Virtuoso/Strand, Virtuoso/grandMA, Virtuoso only, and grandMA only (which is the most actual one). The grandMA joined the production first in Hamburg. We imported an ASCII- Showfile from the Broadway version (Strand). Since then grandMA has joined six productions of Mamma Mia.”

What about the console setup of Mamma Mia! in Stockholm?
“For the Show in Stockholm we controlled everything from one Console, but during load in period we used three consoles in a Multiuser-Network. One for the Moving lights, one for the conventionals, and the third one to run the cues. They were all sharing the same data. During the last previews we cut the third console, and ran the show on a full-size grandMA with a grandMA light as a backup. All in all it was very comfortable to split the system, but always be able to access every channel or fixture from every desk. That gives you the full flexibility during programming sessions.”

To save time during programming, Marcus took the showfiles from two other Mamma Mia! productions to merge them to one use in Stockholm.

“I took the showfiles from Korea (grandMA Moving Lights and Conventionals from early 2004) and from Stuttgart (conventionals only, but Summer 2004) and then deleted the Conventionals from the Korean Showfile and loaded the Stuttgart Conventionals into it”, explains Marcus. “That took about two hours time in preparation to sort out all the numbering of groups, effects, and presets, and after that I used the partial show read of grandMA. That was all done on a laptop in my home office without the need of having a desk in front of me. We just had grandMA onPC (the offline editor of grandMA) to do all this. If there would not have been such a function I would have spend a few days with typing everything from one showfile into the other. That would have required at least a setup with two computers running grandMA onPC or even better a real desk. So the whole merging saved a lot of time and money.”