http://www.nst.com.my:80/Current_News/NST/Thursday/Features/20080430145725/Article/indexF_html

JUDY CRAMER, the producer of the global smash hit musical based on ABBA's songs, shares the process of translating it to the big screen.

IF money, as ABBA recounted, must be funny in a rich man's world, does that necessarily mean that the same mirth extends to the realm of a rich woman?

Judy Craymer, the wildly successful producer of ABBA-inspired stage musical Mamma Mia!, is just such a woman - she's worth over £80 million (about RM480 million) at the last count - and, it seems, can provide an answer.

"Having that sort of money is wonderful, and it's lovely not having to worry about money," chimes the 48-year-old, "but you never truly cast off financial unease, the suspicion that it may slip away at some point."

The daughter of a lawyer and a nurse, raised in North London, Craymer was not born into riches; she has amassed them courtesy of the almost impossibly successful hit show.

Mamma Mia! has already grossed over US$2 billion at the box office, opening in more than 1,500 major cities since its London debut in April, 1999, and is now set for reinvention on the silver screen with such leading lights as Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth in tow (scheduled for Malaysian release on Sept 18).

Not bad for a show that no one, not even ABBA, seemed to regard as a potential success.

Indeed, Andre Ptaszynski, the head of Andrew Lloyd Webber's music publishing group, told her she was mad to even try.

A few days after the opening night, he sent her a dusty first-draft of the script with a note attached - "Found this on the desk the other day. Is it too late to say that it's a good idea?"

"That's funny, isn't it," beams Craymer. "But you can understand people's reticence. After all, when I first started developing the stage show, I wasn't working as a West End producer and had no record of previous hits."

She was, in fact, working as a producer in the rather less glamorous Midlands town of Leicester when she first began developing the project.

She had met the men behind ABBA's success, the songwriters Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, in the mid-1980s when working for Tim Rice on his musical Chess, which was scored by Benny and Bjorn.

"I approached Benny and Bjorn and, as you can understand, they were a little suspicious of my intentions. But after about 10 years badgering them, explaining that we were working on a show that was not a tribute, but rather a truly original musical, they agreed. That was in 1995 and Bjorn said: "Well if you find the right writer and story, we'll see'."

She did just that, working with writer Catherine Johnson, a playwright with whose work she was familiar with, and conjuring up a story set on a sunny Greek island, in which Sophie, a bride-to-be bids to discover the identity of her father by inviting the three potential candidates to her wedding - Sam, Harry and Bill - and who, in doing so, whips up an emotional maelstrom for her single mother, Donna, and Donna's two best friends, Tanya and Rosie.

The musicians liked the story, and with the release of the phenomenally successful CD ABBA Gold in 1993 and the boost the band received when their songs featured in hit Aussie films Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the Scandinavian troubadours began to see the potential.

Benny, however, was not totally convinced until the opening night.

"It's funny looking back," continues Craymer, "but there's a nice story there. Benny and I agreed that one of us was going to be wrong - both of us hoping it was him - and we agreed that whoever was right could say: 'I told you so'. So on April 6, 1999, when the show opened to such good reactions he smiled and said: 'You can say it now'. So I did. 'I told you so'!"

That vindication has been earned a million times over during the course of the last nine years, and it is a sign of her success that Craymer secured all her first-choice actors when electing to bring the musical to the screen.

"The cast we got is amazing," she concedes. "Meryl Streep was our number one choice - we knew she enjoyed singing and we were impressed with what she sang on Robert Altman's last film (A Prairie Home Companion) early last year.

"The boys are such a great bunch too. To have Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellen Skarsgard seems amazing to me. They all said yes quite quickly and provide so much. There has to be a lightness in the film, as there is in the stage show, and they offer that. Colin himself notes that him dancing to ABBA is comedy in itself!"

The film is being helmed by Phyllida Lloyd, the director of the stage show, and while she is, ordinarily more at home with Shakespeare and Brecht, she's proved a highly accomplished musical director, and Craymer had no hesitation in bringing her onboard for the film.

"I wanted to work with Phyllida on this," explains Craymer. "In many ways, the whole story relates to the three of us (Craymer, Lloyd and writer, Johnson). And what's interesting, perhaps even alarming, is that as we shoot the movie, I can see us in the characters more and more!"

Those characters are Donna and her two friends, Tanya and Rosie, played in the film by Streep, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, respectively.

"Their characters are completely different - slightly bossy, a bit chaotic, extremely practical and very high maintenance - but they go so well together. We laugh a lot about who is who in real life!"

Craymer certainly shares common ground with Donna, who claims in the show: "Every morning I wake up and thank God that I don't have a middle-aged menopausal man to bother me. I'm single and it's great."

They are words, Craymer notes, which sum up some of her sentiments.

"I always thought that I'd get married and have kids," she says, "but things never worked out in the right way. I was always more excited about the job than boyfriends. And I can barely take care of myself, never mind a family, so I never much fancied motherhood."

As it transpires, Craymer has her hands full caring for a different type of baby - Mamma Mia! After running for nine years, the show is, in Broadway terms, a middle-aged swinger, but with the cinematic interpretation due this summer, there is still much nurturing to do.

"People might think I'm sad and lonely," she smiles, "but they couldn't be more wrong!" And, as Mamma Mia! attests, Craymer has a knack for proving people wrong. - Courtesy of United International Pictures


Thanks to ABBAMAILer Monique Hoevens, Tilburg, the Netherlands