BWW Reviews: DANCING QUEEN at New Wimbledon Theatre, April 17 2012

If you loved the songs of Abba, you'll enjoy “Dancing Queen”, but you might not love it. Faultless in terms of spectacle – with surely a record number of costume changes – this concert (it's neither a “Bjorn Again” style tribute show aping the originals, nor a “Mamma Mia” style show weaving songs in and out of a narrative) goes through the familiar hits from the Seventies Swedish Supergroup and throws in a few more crowdpleasers too. 

So what's not to like? Well, I can't help feeling a bit short-changed when a show's music is played by a computer and not by portly middle-aged men holding those old-fashioned things, musical instruments. Worse, these backing tracks lose the luxurious orchestration of Benny and Bjorn's arrangements, one of the two secrets of Abba's extraordinary success. The second secret is, of course, Agnetha's glorious soprano voice's complementing by Frida's lower pitched mezzo-soprano vocals in harmonies as gorgeous as any in pop's history. Unfortunately, four voices all sounding like Frida isn't quite what we hear in our heads when the opening bars of “The Name of the Game” fire the synapses. And “Does Your Mother Know” was sung by Bjorn, because it has to be sung by a man. Oh well. 

Okay, that may be your reviewer coming over a bit sniffy, but Abba are pop aristocracy even if they are tribute-banded more than any act not called The Beatles. And perhaps the audience, who loved the show, come not to hear Abba songs recreated, replayed and reinterpreted, but come for a show that lends a little Broadway / Vegas glamour to an England grimly battling a recession as deep as any since, well, the 70s. And what's wrong with that?

Dancing Queen is at New Wimbledon Theatre until 21 April and on tour.