You can see why Abba's Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson keep plugging away at musical theatre. If you've sold 375m albums, you must start thinking, pop-wise, you have no worlds left to conquer – hence this one-off, semi-staged English-language revival of their 1995 epic, mercifully edited down to around two hours from a terrifying-sounding four-hour Swedish original, crisply titled Kristina från Duvemåla.
Based around the novels of Vilhelm Moberg, it shares its mood not with the joyous blue-satin knickerbockered glory of Waterloo or Dancing Queen, but with the other Abba, the bleak, gloomy Abba of The Visitors and The Day Before You Came, records that reminded you they came from the land of Bergman and winter nights so long and depressing some people feel impelled to write four-hour long musicals to fill them.
Here receiving its UK premiere, this show is clearly aimed at a very different audience from the globe-swallowing Mamma Mia! Anyone turning up in a pink cowboy hat is likely to realise they're incorrectly attired midway through the song about lice infestation, prosaically titled Lice. Still, they're in for an educational evening. You hear how Ulvaeus and Andersson apply their distinct melodic sensibility to a vaguely operatic score – with variable success, as it turns out, although you can't knock the big showstopper I'll Be Waiting There, expertly performed by Russell Watson and Helen Sjöholm, who, like the rest of the cast, cope pretty manfully with a libretto you wouldn't inflict on your worst enemy. Alas, when it comes to lyrics, the Abba of The Visitors and The Day Before You Came is swamped by the Abba of Dum Dum Diddle ("you are only smilin' when you play your violin") and Sitting In A Palm Tree ("I will stay here among my coconuts"). At one juncture, a Swedish peasant is required to express the injustice of his lot via the line: "Though I sleep on dung, I must hold my tongue."
Elsewhere, you find out about the 19th-century Swedish diaspora setting up home in America (overlooked in films and drama in favour of other emigrant groups, perhaps for the reason that they don't seem to have done a lot when they got there, beyond farming and being stoic) and learn of the unexpectedly fatal effects of eating too much porridge during a famine, which does for the titular heroine's daughter in act one. Oat-based breakfasts: the silent killer.
Reeling with hunger and fear of cereal-related fatalities, Kristina and family leave Duvemåla for the new world with a motley collection of villagers, including a prostitute looking to better herself ("never shall my daughter oblige a pleasure-seeker, not like me, the one they call . . . Ulrika") and her husband's brother, who you just know is doomed the minute he walks on stage: "He has no heart for farming!" we hear. "Your whims can only lead to disasters!"
A quick glance at the song titles suggests things aren't going to pick up – quite aside from Lice, there's No!, Miscarriage, Never! and Peasants at Sea, which turns out to be a litany of ocean-going misery.
Kristina doesn't like America. There's a lot of farming and being stoic about things, not least the death of her brother-in-law, who snuffs it as expected, but not before singing a song about it: "Beyond the burning prairie, I got lost, I was foolish and unwary."
Eventually Kristina expires too, during childbirth: "I found her slumped by the milking stool." The crowd gave the show a standing ovation, Abba nuts and musical devotees to a man. Something similar happened in Stockholm in the 1990s, where the story of the Swedish diaspora obviously has a huge emotional resonance and the show ran and ran. There is talk of this production touring – what the wider world might make of Kristina seems open to question.
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Originally Posted by lolly
