ABBA Fab

 Mamma Mia!, defying critical drubbings for half a decade, has been called a Twinkie of a musical. But that's an insult to spongy Hostess snack cakes that have stood the test of time. Think of it as more of a theatrical baklava: layers of tissue-thin story line piled one atop the other and stuck together with the syrupy goo of disco-era ABBA tunes. Twinkies and better musicals than this will outlast us all. Phyllo dough and Mamma Mia! have much shorter shelf lives.

Like a chick-lit novel set to music, Mamma Mia! plants its big wet smooches on true love (however late it arrives) and mother-daughter bonding. The main plot has 20-year-old bride-to-be Sophie Sheridan (Carrie Manolakos) and her hippie mother, Donna (Laurie Wells), welcoming an assortment of wedding guests to their small Greek island inn. In her youth, Donna was part of a three-girl singing group who dressed like the drag queens of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (a witty movie that exercised better restraint with ABBA's muscular beats). The trio reunites for virgin Sophie's wedding to her nebbish fiancé, Sky (Corey Greenan).

The nuptials and the girl-group get-together have frowzy Donna in a tizzy. But further complications ensue after Sophie snoops in her mother's old diaries in hopes of figuring out the identity of her biological dad. She invites three candidates (Sean Allan Krill, Ian Simpson, Milo Shandel) to the wedding, each unaware that he was a potential sperm donor two decades earlier.

As chick-lit formulas go, there are also many squishy subplots to deal with. Donna's former singing partners (Lisa Mandel, Laura Ware) try to get their old friend out of her funk by squeezing back into their old metallic jumpsuits and platform boots for some close-harmonizing. These scenes provide the show's best moments, with Mandel and Ware serving as welcome comic relief from the otherwise maudlin story points. They mug wildly as ABBA-belting versions of the same brand of aging tarts Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders played on Absolutely Fabulous.

The Ab/Fab comparisons even extend to Sophie, who's a Saffy-like square who doesn't quite get her mother's history as a free-love advocate. (Naturally, it's the squarest of the three men who turns out to be her father.)

Heavy on the heart tugs and hokum, Mamma Mia! also features some truly gag-inducing sequences, including a glow-in-the-dark dance number with boys wearing purple wetsuits. And don't get in a hurry to leave after the booming final number. It's only a teaser for the triple-layer encore. These dancing queens keep coming back whether we want them to or not.

All this does not mean Mamma Mia! is a terrible two and a half hours of entertainment. No, despite the corny jokes, overdone emotions, silly choreography and ghastly vintage hits by the Swedish pop group, it's nearly impossible not to fall for the attractive cast (great voices all around, especially Laurie Wells in the lead as Donna) and not to bob the head along with the insistently chirpy score.

It's a pretty show to look at and to listen to. The scenic design by Mark Thompson--all Aegean blues to depict a sun-washed Greek isle--pleases the eyes. The orchestra bathes the ears in highly amplified synthesized chords. Every moment is as slickly manufactured as a cellophane-wrapped cupcake.

But there's more to making artful musical theater than creating a sweetsy-poo story (as writer Catherine Johnson has done here) and force-feeding it a bunch of goopy pop anthems. In great shows going back to Oklahoma! and on up to A Chorus Line and Rent, the songs serve to further the plot elements. In Mamma Mia! they stop the show and not in a good way. It's hard to superimpose incomprehensible disco drivel such as "S.O.S." and "Chiquitita" onto any plausible situation. And face it, ABBA's composers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus wrote songs whose lyrics bear only a passing acquaintanceship with the English language. Sample from the little ditty "Super Trouper," which is included in Mamma Mia!:

Tonight the

Super trouper lights are gonna find me

Shining like the sun

(soo-per troup-per)

Smiling, having fun

(soo-per troup-per)

Feeling like a number one.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, you may keep resting comfortably.

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Speaking of disturbing the dead, actress Morgana Shaw is channeling a certain goggle-eyed moviestar in All About Bette: An Evening with Bette Davis, winding up a short run in the basement at Theatre Three. But unfasten your seatbelts; it's not such a bumpy ride.

This one-woman tribute to the legendary star begs for some bumps, some jolts, some of the highs and lows of a well-written play. As it is, All About Bette, directed by Jac Alder, feels like a half-rehearsed, amateurish work-in-progress. It's an hour too long, and playwright Camilla Carr's script is little more than an artless, shapeless clip job that has Bette pacing around pedantically listing every award she ever won and chronologically running through her filmography with all the flair of someone reading her résumé aloud.

When we first see Bette, it's the one we'd like to forget: in her 80s, face ravaged by a stroke but still puffing away on her cigs. It's the Bette that Martin Short does such a creepily accurate impersonation of.