Story of the Week: The Return of Mamma Mia!, Broadway’s Feel-Good Musical for Dark Times

On Tuesday we reported that Mamma Mia!, the ABBA jukebox musical that ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2015, was returning to the Winter Garden Theatre this summer.

Story of the Week will look back at the significance of the original run, explain why Mamma Mia! has enchanted millions of theatergoers, and speculate on the chances the show will actually close on Feb. 1, 2026, when this limited run is slated to end. But first, in case you somehow missed out…

What is Mamma Mia!?

The musical uses the songs of Swedish pop band ABBA to tell a story about Sophie, a 20-year-old who is getting married on a fictional Greek island. She wants her dad to walk her down the aisle, but she’s never met him. Based on her mother’s diary entries, she deduces that it could be one of three men—so she invites all three to the wedding.

Producer Judy Craymer came up with the initial idea, hiring Catherine Johnson to write the book and Phyllida Lloyd to direct. The show premiered on London’s West End in 1999, followed by a sit-down production in Toronto and a North American tour. Then it opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre in October 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks that left thousands of New Yorkers dead and transformed Manhattan’s iconic twin towers into smoking ruin.

Who would want to see a sunny diversion like Mamma Mia! after experiencing such a world-historical trauma? Apparently, a lot of people. A lighthearted escape from the real world to a fantasy Greek island, Mamma Mia! was an instant hit, easily recouping its initial investment and then some. It performed 5,758 times on Broadway (mostly at the Winter Garden, but later at the Broadhurst), making it the ninth-longest-running Broadway show ever. And the original West End production is still going.

TheaterMania’s review from October 2001 describes Mamma Mia! as “a money machine that doesn’t need critical acclaim,” and that has proven prescient. Faint praise (and one accusation of plagiarism) from New York’s critics made no impact whatsoever on its runaway success, which is now the standard to which all jukebox musicals aspire. Every season Broadway gets at least one or two new musicals based around old song catalogues, but none of them has ever lasted as long as Mamma Mia!

Why has Mamma Mia! proved so popular?

The unspoken promise of all jukebox musicals is that, for the price of a Broadway ticket, you can recapture your youth for a few hours through the magic of pop music. Remember when you were “young and sweet—only seventeen?” Mamma Mia! transports audiences back to that place, inviting viewers to dance along during the curtain call. It’s no coincidence that the plot revolves around a wedding, a time-honored setting for comedy and one of the only venues where grandma can be persuaded to get up and bust a move.

Plenty of shows have tried to replicate this model, with diminishing returns. At least in New York, the devised plot jukebox musical (in which an entirely fictitious story is built around a particular artist’s songbook, like in Mamma Mia!) temporarily foundered in 2005 on the twin flops Good Vibrations (The Beach Boys) and All Shook Up (Elvis)—although this form never lost its appeal in London, where productions costs are cheaper and theater is much more of a drinking experience.

The success of Jersey Boys that same year resulted in a slew of bio-musicals, in which the songs an artist made popular are used to present a highly favorable stage biography. A Beautiful Noise, MJ, and A Wonderful World are all recent examples of this. The more of these I see, the more I’m convinced that they make the fundamental mistake of assuming that the selling-point is the artist, when it is actually nostalgia—the way these songs underscored significant moments in the viewers’ lives like weddings and proms. Theatergoers are far more interested in reliving that feeling than learning the details of Louis Armstrong’s failed third marriage.

I’m heartened by the success of & Juliet, a devised plot jukebox musical imagining an alternate fate for Shakespeare’s Juliet, which won no Tony Awards in 2023 yet has managed to outlast every musical that did. It tells us nothing about songwriter Max Martin, but it does put some of the greatest pop hits of the last several decades in service of a story about marriage and self-discovery. And then there’s Titaníque, which entirely trades on giggly late-’90s nostalgia set to the discography of Céline Dion. All of this suggests that audiences are more than ready to embrace a revival of Mamma Mia!, perhaps more enthusiastically now than they did the first time around.

There’s a certain resonance to the fact that Mamma Mia! was the first show in the Winter Garden following the extraordinary original run of Cats (the fifth-longest-running show). Both have never stopped touring, bringing Broadway-caliber theater to parts of the country where many producers fear to tread (I am convinced this is the key to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s success). Like it or not, this is what theater looks like to large swathes of the market outside New York, because these are the musicals that bother to show up. The 2008 film adaptation of Mamma Mia!, starring Meryl Streep, was only recently supplanted as the highest-grossing movie-musical ever. This is a musical that millions of fans know and love.

That makes Mamma Mia! a sure bet for already satisfied customers, who will be eager to return and share the show with friends and family. And with ticket prices as high as they are, I don’t blame anyone opting for a sure bet. The people who insist theatergoers ought to be more adventurous and spend their disposable income on new musicals with original scores mostly attend on comps.

Will this revival really close on February 1, 2026?

It really depends on how well it does at the box office. It would be a big gamble for the Winter Garden’s landlord, the Shubert Organization, to kick out a show that is printing money to make way for something new and untested. And yet Mamma Mia! was announced as a limited run and there are only 41 Broadway theaters, with a far larger number of Broadway-bound shows circling the runway like planes at LaGuardia. Venue agreements are often years in the making, and the moderate popularity of a currently running show is not enough to forestall an expected box office juggernaut, as the Beetlejuice–Music Man saga taught us.

I can easily see a scenario in which the revival of Mamma Mia! does great box office, but perhaps not great enough to sustain a run at the Winter Garden for years on end. In that case, there is a solution: Mamma Mia! could move to a smaller Broadway venue (as the original run did in 2013 when it transferred to the Broadhurst) or it could transfer to a larger off-Broadway venue. The theatrical multiplex New World Stages has long served as a kind of Broadway retirement home, hosting successful off-Broadway runs of Avenue Q and Jersey Boys in the years following their departures from Broadway. That venue is, coincidently, owned and operated by the Shubert Organization.

Either way, I do expect Mamma Mia! to stick around after its announced February 1 closing date. The show has broad appeal and has built up a deep fanbase over the last two decades.

As the original run’s longtime star Judy McLane said during her 2015 exit interview with TheaterMania, “Don’t take Paxil. Don’t take Zoloft. Come and see Mamma Mia!” I suspect that antidepressant effect is something theatergoers will crave through at least January 2029.