Winter Garden Theatre

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  If last week’s box-office tallies are any indication, Broadway audiences really want their mommy. The national tour of Mamma Mia! has just set up camp (or at least kitsch) at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show’s original production ran for 14 years, and in the first week of its scheduled sixth-month engagement it outgrossed every other show except fellow marathon runners The Lion King, Wicked and Hamilton. This show, the mother of all jukebox musicals, is nothing if not familiar—and in this case, familiarity breeds contentment. Comfort has always been central to this show’s appeal. Mamma Mia! is constructed around nearly two dozen 1970s Europop bops by the Swedish megagroup ABBA, including “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper” and “Take a Chance on Me”: all the ABBA songs you love plus a few others you probably don’t have strong feelings about one way or the other. (Of the 19 tracks on the greatest-hits album ABBA Gold, the only one missing here is “Fernando,” which was sliced from an early draft.) These songs—written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, sometimes with help from Stig Anderson—are easy to swallow and hard to resist, with infectious melodies and lyrics that are, shall we say, direct: Their titles include "Honey, Honey," "Money, Money, Money," "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" and "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do."  Mamma Mia! | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus But while Mamma Mia! originally inspired warm fuzzies for its score, it now...