Word: abba
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...Watching the long queues in front of the St. James Theatre, Broadway entrepreneurs had an epiphany: sad was out, glad was in. From now on, instead of looking for another sullen, finger-wagging faux-opera, they would try to find "the next ?Producers'." Sure enough, the ABBA's greatest-hits medley "Mamma Mia!" arrived and became the top new tourist attraction. It and "The Producers" have both been grossing $1 million or more a week (the golden number for a Broadway show) ever since. "Thoroughly Modern Millie," the Julie Andrews musical without Julie Andrews, followed and won the Tony...
...Abba had it so much easier. The Swedish rock group (whose leaders, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, had been burned on Broadway once before, with their 1988 musical Chess) simply sat back and let a bunch of other folks take Abba's hit songs, graft them onto a flimsy story about a girl looking for her real dad on her wedding day and turn Mamma Mia! into a smash hit on Broadway--and just about everywhere else in the Western world...
...most common con, accounting for 9% of all e-mail fraud, is the infamous Nigerian Letter. I got one from a Mr. ABBA ABACHA (his caps-lock key appears to be stuck) who claims to be a Nigerian official with $25 million that he needs to smuggle out of the country. If you try to help, he will hit you for processing fees and "advance loans," and you will never see a dime. In the past few months, this well-worn scam has been evolving, so watch out for new variants involving Afghan war booty or a secret trove...
...With ABBA as their only cultural reference point for Swedish music, most Americans think of it as being a little peculiar. There's plenty peculiar about the Hives. Having grown up in the mining town of Fagersta (pop. 13,000), the band members, now all in their early 20s, claim they were brought together as schoolboys by an unlikely sounding guru known as Randy Fitzsimmons. From the start, the Hives tried to replicate the sounds of the punk rock and '50s soul music they loved. There were two problems. The first--overcome through years of dedicated strumming and banging...
...film school," he says. "I worked the cameras and I edited," mostly on music shorts for Swedish television. Gradually, Hallström shifted his focus from the small screen to the big. But few people saw his first feature, a boy-meets-girl tale, or his second, ABBA: The Movie, about the group's 1977 Australian tour. Real recognition didn't come until My Life as a Dog, which won top Swedish honors and two Oscar nominations...