Word: ulvaeus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...makings of a thrilling stage experience: noble peasants, dying children, powerful voices, the dream of a new land. Most of all, a superb score. No wonder that, at the end, cheers and a standing ovation greeted Kristina's creators: two spangled Swedes, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus - once, and always, the guys from ABBA...
...Where have Benny and Bjorn been? Well, their music has been on Broadway, eight times a week for the past eight years, and in theaters around the world. Mamma Mia!, the show based on Andersson and Ulvaeus' ABBA songbook, has been the major theatrical hit of the past decade and an international blockbuster of a movie. But those tunes are old; ABBA burst on the scene in 1974 by winning the Eurovision competition with Waterloo, and the quartet - Andersson, Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad - lasted eight more years, breaking up in 1982. Then what? The lads did what...
...Bangkok," "Nobody's Side" and "I Know Him So Well" - and impressed many listeners as having the richest score of the decade. Or, he added defiantly, any decade since. Andersson, who had shown a mastery of the pop idiom as composer of the music for the ABBA songs (Ulvaeus wrote the words), tapped a symphonic romanticism that wedded Richard Rodgers to the brassier modern idiom. The Andersson-Ulvaeus partnership was poised to dominate Broadway. (See TIME's top 10 plays and musicals...
...Instead, they went home, where Andersson had an even more ambitious idea: to compose Kristina fran Duvemala (Kristina from Duvemala) as a sung-through national epic, in a style that would span folk tunes, symphonies and musical theater. Ulvaeus, adapting the Moberg novels - which had served as the source for two popular Swedish films in the '70s, The Emigrants and The New Land - also had a radical notion: for the first time in his career, he'd write his lyrics in his native language...
...containing a staggering 39 songs, the piece was staged in Stockholm in 1997 and ran for nearly four years. The three-disc CD topped the local charts but was never issued abroad. Herbert Kretzmer, who had anglicized the French musical Les Misérables, worked with Andersson and Ulvaeus on an English translation, yet despite the seismic success of Mamma Mia!, the new show never left Sweden...