New tricks with old songs

When it opened three years ago, Mamma Mia! was a oneoff among pop musicals. Unlike Buddy, the show was not a biography told in song. Nor was it a plotless medley of hits in the vein of Five Guys Named Moe, Ain't Misbehavin' and Smokey Joe's Café. Mamma Mia! was an altogether more exotic hybrid. It sewed a canon of classic pop songs by a single group into the fabric of a play.

The songs were by Abba, but the play was not about the group or the pair of marriages and divorces that famously occurred within it. Playwright Catherine Johnson took the lyrics by Björn Ulvaeus and transplanted them in a story about an English girl brought up by her single mother on a Greek island, who invites to her wedding a trio of men in the hope that one of them is her long-lost father. It was the first back-catalogue musical. The director Phyllida Lloyd called it "the musical that Björn and Benny never knew they had written".

Now that a Tony-nominated production of Mamma Mia! is up and running on Broadway, it is inevitable that other acts' repertoires are being scoured for songs that might respond similarly to dramatisation. In January, as part of Melbourne's gay summer festival, a show called I Should Be So Lucky commandeered 25 Kylie Minogue songs to tell the story of a gay man looking for love. In the autumn, the West End can expect Our House, a musical based on the songs of Madness, woven together by northern playwright Tim Firth. Meanwhile, Neil Labute is working on what he calls a "dark" musical with Elvis Costello, using songs from Costello's most recent album, When I Was Cruel.

But the biggest, blowsiest of them all is We Will Rock You, in which Ben Elton jigsaws the songs of Queen into a mock-bombastic plot about a dystopian future where instruments have been banned and all pop homogenised. The realm of outrageous fiction seems a logical setting for the songs. Queen always was a platform for Freddie Mercury's theatricality.

When the show's producer, Robert De Niro, first met Roger Taylor and Brian May of Queen, he touted the idea of a biographical musical. "We decided we couldn't bear the idea," says Taylor. "It would be too painful, too close, and a bit grand. It would be for somebody else to do. You can't supervise your own history."

If Elton has his way, the show will rock you with laughter. "We thought Queen were quite tongue in cheek," says Taylor, and it was obviously this that pointed to Elton: "We wanted someone with an English wit."

If Mamma Mia! is going to be taken as the model for the back-catalogue musical, then the area where wit is most needed is in cueing up the songs. Johnson unabashedly dropped the titles into her dialogue. "It became very obvious to me," she says, "that there would be a moment where the woman would challenge her ex-lover with The Winner Takes It All, and a moment when someone used Take A Chance On Me as a chat-up line. I was lucky, because Abba's songs do tell little stories."

The segue from dialogue to song is similarly blunt in We Will Rock You. "I love that part," says Elton. "I am a man of simple tastes. Brian and Roger think we should be subtler. I don't." However, some of Elton's more gauche juxtapositions may have been refined. "If it made us cringe," says Taylor, "we said we'd have to find a better way to get the song in."

At the same time, Taylor is not under any illusions about the populist nature of the beast. "People like what they know," he says. "I suppose this is less of a risk than a completely original piece." Maybe the unfamiliarity of the new songs in Closer to Heaven, playwright Jonathan Harvey's collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, explained its spectacular flop last year.

Theatre producers are never slow to spot a low-risk bandwagon. But don't expect a complete takeover of the West End by back-catalogue musicals. Ben Elton still cherishes the idea of a David Bowie musical, but the bandwagon aspect would presumably put off the songwriter himself. Johnson wouldn't say no to doing The Smiths, though the informal approaches that followed Mamma Mia! concerned Cat Stevens and the Carpenters. "I like the Carpenters," she muses, "but I wouldn't know how to steer the dialogue towards Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft."