Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is being embraced this summer as the perfect film to warm the cockles of a news-weary audience. From the Greek sunshine to the nostalgic Abba soundtrack, and Cher’s camp swagger, everything about the film has been engineered to make the audience feel cosy.
But could the Abba tracks themselves have been tweaked to put us more at ease? The lyrics to Lily James and Celia Imrie’s ritzy rendition of When I Kissed the Teacher (recently described as “a pop homage to low level sexual harassment”) were changed for the film – prompting fears that even Abba have to be “woke-ified” for modern consumption. The gender of the teacher who kisses the student in the song has been switched from male to female and a key phrase altered. Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus says this isn’t a response to the predatory tales revealed by #MeToo, but simply a tactic to avoid a “horrible” key change. “She had to be a woman. Simple as that,” he has said.
It’s a question many stage productions of classic works wrestle with. The producers of a recent revival of Rossini’s opera The Italian Girl of Algiers have expressed their difficulties with the racial stereotypes in the original work, and how, without changing the libretto, they gave the Muslim lead more complexity and a specific motivation for his unheroic acts.
It’s not a new phenomenon; musicals have been filleted of offensive or controversial elements for decades. The 1927 musical Show Boat is a classic example – despite its progressive intentions (for the time), productions are often picketed by protesters objecting to its racist language, including the n-word in the opening number Cotton Blossom, which has been replaced with everything from “darkies” to “here we all”. The 1949 show South Pacific attracts a double controversy. Some recent productions cut Happy Talk, because of its patronising use of “pidgin English”, but the most disputed song was once You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught. This song, which suggests racism is the product of cultural conditioning, embarrassed many contemporary audiences and critics, who suggested it should be excised. Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the lyrics, stuck to his guns, saying: “That’s what the show is about!”
If ever a musical felt out of place in the #MeToo era, it would be Carousel – in which wife-beater Billy Bigelow eventually finds his way to Heaven – yet it was recently produced on Broadway with no cuts at all. Even Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (“A woman ought to know her place is behind her man”) is regularly performed, mostly with a knowing wink.
In fact, many producers realise that some audiences go to the theatre to have their views challenged, or at least to accept a work of art from another time at its face value. The current West End production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 show The King and I has a predominantly Asian cast and has reinstated a song from the score that the 1956 film discarded. Western People Funny wittily confronts westerners’ fetishisation of Asian people: “They feel so sentimental/About the Oriental/They always try to turn us/Inside down and upside out!” The Guardian critic Michael Billington called its inclusion a “calculated provocation”. A London revival of The Biograph Girl included a song exposing the racial violence encouraged by the release of The Birth of a Nation, a film that the musical otherwise celebrates as a masterpiece. This number, Rivers of Blood, was cut from the 1980 West End premiere.
Turns out, the strongest numbers in a musical are often the ones that nobody wants to sing along to.
