Judy Craymer's ABBA musical opened in London in April 1999 and has never stopped running. In autumn 2026 it is playing the Novello Theatre with a booking period stretching to October 2027, while a separate UK and international tour works its way from Nottingham towards Germany.

A producer who would not let go of a catalogue

The show began with a meeting rather than a script. Judy Craymer first encountered Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson in 1983, and spent years pushing the idea that ABBA's back catalogue could carry a book musical rather than a revue. The song she kept returning to was The Winner Takes It All — a piece of writing with a situation, a history and a loser already built into it, which is exactly what a stage narrative needs and what most pop hits lack.

The commission that unlocked it went to the Bristol playwright Catherine Johnson, who wrote the book in 1997. Phyllida Lloyd, who had come out of opera and straight theatre rather than musicals, joined as director in 1998. The construction problem they solved together is the reason the show outlived its imitators: Johnson built a plot — a bride-to-be on a Greek island invites three men who might be her father — in which the existing songs land as arguments, confessions and evasions rather than as interruptions.

Andersson and Ulvaeus stayed close to the work, sharing the orchestrations with Martin Koch. Anthony Van Laast choreographed, Mark Thompson designed the set and costumes, Howard Harrison lit it, and Andrew Bruce and Bobby Aitken did the sound. That creative line-up has remained on the credits of every subsequent replica production, including the ones running now.

April 1999, and everything after

Mamma Mia! opened at the Prince Edward Theatre in London on 6 April 1999. It has been running in the West End continuously since, moving houses along the way and settling at the Novello, where it is now the third longest-running musical in West End history.

Broadway followed in October 2001, at the Winter Garden Theatre, and stayed for nearly fourteen years and 5,773 performances before closing in September 2015. That run is the spine of the show's finances and of its reputation: it arrived in New York weeks after the September 11 attacks and became one of the productions credited with keeping Times Square trading through a bad winter.

The cumulative numbers are unusual even by long-run standards. The show has played in more than 60 countries, has been seen by over 70 million people and has grossed around $4.5 billion worldwide. Licensing has widened rather than narrowed with age: the title became available to schools in the UK and Ireland from September 2026, and the original 1999 London cast recording was pressed on vinyl for the first time following an announcement in June 2025, in a gatefold double album that restores three encore tracks first added to the fifth-anniversary CD in 2004.

The Broadway return, and what the critics made of it

The most recent major event in the show's life was a limited Broadway revival, staged in the theatre where the original had lived. Previews began at the Winter Garden on 2 August 2025, the production opened on 14 August 2025, and it closed on 1 February 2026 after 195 performances. Christine Sherrill played Donna Sheridan, Amy Weaver played Sophie, with Jalynn Steele as Tanya, Carly Sakolove as Rosie, Victor Wallace as Sam, Jim Newman as Bill, Rob Marnell as Harry and Grant Reynolds as Sky.

Commercially it was emphatic: an average capacity of 99.23 per cent and $45.7 million taken across the run. In its opening week, Time Out New York's Adam Feldman noted, it outgrossed everything on Broadway except The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton.

The notices were less uniform. Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Times found the production sprightlier than she remembered and praised the band's precision, while calling the scaled-down set flimsy. Brian Scott Lipton of Cititour thought the design more basic than before. Robert Hofler in The Wrap was hostile, describing it as the 2001 staging with a poor repaint. Michael Sommers at New York Stage Review liked the orchestra's hard, clean Swedish sound; his colleague David Finkle called the ensemble outstanding and said none of them were undeserving of billing, which was notable in a company carrying no star names. The consensus, across roughly fifteen reviews, was that the show does not change and that its audience does not want it to.

Where it stands in September 2026

London is the constant. The Novello production plays Monday to Saturday at 7.30pm with matinees on Thursday and Saturday at 3pm, and runs 2 hours 35 minutes including a 15-minute interval. In September 2026 the producers announced a new West End company and extended the booking period through to 2 October 2027. From 12 October 2026 the London cast is led by Sara Poyzer as Donna, with Richard Standing as Sam, Vivien Carter as Tanya, Laura Medforth as Rosie, Ellie Gilbert-Grey as Sophie, Kyle Cox as Sky, Daniel Crowder as Harry and Rakesh Boury as Bill. Emma Odell plays Donna at certain performances. The show turned 27 on 6 April 2026.

Running alongside it is a separate UK and international tour, which is the production most of the country actually sees. Its current leg opened in October 2025 and spent the first half of 2026 in Swansea, Newcastle, Aberdeen, Manchester and Leicester before finishing at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, on 29 August 2026. It resumes immediately: Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall from 29 September, then Milton Keynes, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Cardiff, a Christmas residency at the Liverpool Empire from 8 December 2026 into early January, and Plymouth in January 2027.

From February 2027 the tour crosses the Channel for a long continental run — Bregenz, Zurich, Vienna, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig and Cologne through the spring, then Berlin's Admiralspalast, Oberhausen's Metronom Theater and Bremen's Metropol Theater in autumn 2027. Earlier stops on the same touring frame included Lausanne in March 2025 and La Seine Musicale in Paris that April, which gives a sense of how the routing works: a few weeks in each house, arenas where the theatres are too small, and no break between territories.

Why it still sells

The reason the show persists is not mystery but reliability, and the touring cast is where that gets tested. Jenn Griffin has been playing Donna on the current UK leg, with Ashleigh Jones as alternate Donna; Lydia Hunt played Sophie through the earlier dates, with Hazel Baldwin in the role by the Glasgow run, alongside Sarah Earnshaw as Tanya, Lauren Woolf as Rosie and Richard Taylor Woods, Simon Victor and Richard Vorster as the three possible fathers.

Reviewers of the touring production have landed consistently at four stars. Anna Nichols, writing for West End Best Friend, singled out Griffin and Hunt and the Act One finale of Voulez-Vous. The Glasgow notice in August 2026 praised Van Laast's choreography and the clarity of the sound design, noted that the live band occasionally runs loud, and recorded the specific local detail that the house erupted at the lyric naming the city — an ordinary moment in a show whose audience knows the words better than the cast does.

What that adds up to is a piece of theatre that has stopped being an event and become infrastructure. It plays year-round in London, tours continuously through Britain and Europe, and now feeds a schools licence. The set has been criticised in New York for looking cheap and the book has never been mistaken for literature, but the thing Craymer spent fifteen years arguing for — that these songs can carry a story — has held up for twenty-seven years and shows no sign of being retired.

The show, now

A performance runs about two and a half hours with one interval — 2 hours 35 minutes including a 15-minute break in London, and 2 hours 30 minutes as timed on the 2025 Broadway revival. There is no support act; it is a book musical played straight through in two acts, opening the morning before Sophie's wedding and ending the morning after it. Mark Thompson's design is a single revolving taverna structure on a Greek island that opens out into courtyard, bedroom and jetty, with the band unseen and the costume shift from summer linen to seventies jumpsuits saved for the end. The song order is fixed: Honey Honey and Money, Money, Money early, Voulez-Vous closing Act One at full company scale, The Winner Takes It All as Donna's solo late in Act Two, then the title number and Dancing Queen. The curtain call is a three-song megamix with Donna and the Dynamos in platform heels and sequins, and it is where the auditorium stops sitting down. Reviewers of the current UK tour have given it four stars consistently, praising Anthony Van Laast's choreography and, in Glasgow in August 2026, the clarity of the sound mix — with the caveat that the live band sometimes plays loud enough to push the vocal. Critics of the 2025 New York revival split on the set, several finding the touring-scale version thin, while agreeing the ensemble singing was strong and the audience response uncomplicated. Expect a crowd that knows every lyric and treats the last ten minutes as a concert.

Researched from en.wikipedia.org · mamma-mia.com · mamma-mia.com · mamma-mia.com · mamma-mia.com · westendwilma.com · playbill.com · broadwayworld.com

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