Mamma Mia!

Sophie reads her mother’s diary to her friends and confides the existence of the three men. The moment a secret is first spoken aloud is painted as breezy chatter.

• Originally sung by two, the song is divided among Sophie and her two friends and turned into a conversation of reading diary passages and chiming in. Here the show’s way of speaking, with songs passing back and forth like dialogue, first takes hold.
• Each time one of the men from the diary appears, the song’s flow breaks off for a moment and the girls’ reactions cut in. These breaks let the audience remember the three names without effort.
• The original is an early ABBA song from the 1974 album “Waterloo,” among the earliest of the songs used in this show.
• In the 2008 film, Amanda Seyfried sang it with the actresses playing her friends.

The title song absorbs Donna’s shock at meeting her three old lovers all at once. The lyrics are unchanged, but the new situation turns them into comedy.

• The short figure (a riff, a brief melodic fragment that stubbornly repeats the same bar) that ticks over and over in the introduction builds tension like the second hand of a clock. On stage, the sound reads as Donna’s pounding heart.
• Because the original was a song lamenting falling again and again for the same lover, it fits the plight of Donna as she faces three old lovers. It is the clearest example of how this show threads songs into the drama.
• The original reached No. 1 on the UK singles chart in early 1976.
• In the film, Meryl Streep sings it while clambering over the roof of a goat shed and up into a loft, so the physical comedy grows bigger than on stage. It is sung once more at the curtain call after the show ends.

Donna’s old bandmates lift the dazed Donna back to her feet. A song about being seventeen becomes a song of middle-aged friends reclaiming their youth.

• Opening with a glissando, in which a hand sweeps across the keys so the notes glide into one another, the introduction holds the most famous few seconds of the original. That single sound changes the air of the stage.
• It is ABBA’s only No. 1 on the US Billboard singles chart.
• The wedding march is this very song, slowed down and rearranged. The same melody appears twice in the show, dressed in different clothes.
• In the film, the scene grows as the island’s women join in one by one and parade down to the dock, so that the three friends’ song becomes the song of the whole island.

This is the duet Donna and Sam sing when they first stand squarely face to face. Feelings that resent yet cannot let go cross inside a single song.

• The two share one song, yet they sound less like they are speaking to each other than like each is delivering a monologue. The distance of being together and still not reaching each other is built right into the way the song speaks.
• The verse (the opening part that tells the story) hesitates in a minor-key color that sounds dark and lonely, then seems to burst open into a bright-sounding major key in the chorus. This contrast divides the pent-up heart from the cry that breaks free.
• The original is often cited as the song that put ABBA, who had stalled after “Waterloo,” back on the international charts.
• In the film, it was sung by Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep.

Harry and Donna retrace a summer from their youth together. The song embodies the mood of the second act's backward-looking numbers.

• A song sung on a Greek island summons a summer in Paris. That the song’s setting differs from the play’s present reminds us that this memory is already in the past.
• The melody flows calmly, never excited, creating the voice of reminiscence in which longing and regret are blended together.
• The original is a track from the 1980 album “Super Trouper.” It shows that not only well-known hit singles but album tracks too took important places in the show.
• In the film, it becomes a scene sung by the three would-be fathers and Sophie together on a boat, widening the two-person reminiscence into a song shared by many.

A mother's song as she helps her daughter get ready on the wedding morning. The true center, hidden beneath the surface story of a search for a father, comes into view.

• The original is a parent's song about watching a child leave the house each morning. In the show that morning becomes the morning of the wedding, and the weight of letting go grows far heavier.
• This is the only duet in the entire show sung by mother and daughter alone. The way the two voices travel separately and then come together traces their relationship exactly.
• The original appeared on the 1981 album “The Visitors.”
• In the film it was sung by Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried, and, as on stage, it became one of the show's standout quiet scenes.

The show's climax, in which Donna pours out to Sam everything she has swallowed for twenty years. It is also the song that first gave producer Craymer the idea for the show.

• Over a piano accompaniment, a melody of the same shape repeats with each verse, rising and deepening little by little. Because the emotion builds through repetition, the performer can move within a single song from resignation to anger and on to confession.
• The original, sung by Agnetha Fältskog, topped the UK singles chart in 1980. On stage, a song of resignation becomes words spoken while looking one person straight in the eye.
• The brief silence that follows the song is part of the scene too. A show that has raced along on high spirits comes to a halt for the first time.
• On stage Donna sings directly to Sam; in the film the song was sung by Meryl Streep.

The song Sophie sang alone as the curtain rose sounds again at the end. Having crossed a single day, the same melody carries a different weight.

• A fine example of the reprise, in which an earlier song is sung again later in the show. Placing the same song at the beginning and the end closes the story like a circle.
• The original was released in 1979, with a children's choir from the Stockholm International School joining on the chorus. On stage Sophie fills that part alone, and the innocence of children's voices becomes a twenty-year-old's soliloquy.
• The overture and prologue, the cast album's first track, open with this melody, and the final track is this song as well.
• The film also opens with this song, carrying over the stage version's framing structure intact.