06-01 ABBA Museum and Mamma Mia Party

During the 70's it seemed like there was an ABBA song playing on the radio all of the time. They were a Swedish band, but we never knew it because they sang their hits for us in English.

They have an ABBA Museum here in Stockholm, so we thought we'd get to know them a little better. They had a handheld audio guide tour that we took and learned that each of them was a performer and well known in Sweden before they got together. That three of them had records out before they got together.

The two guys met first, Benny and Bjorn. Then they each met their girlfriends and decided they had a better vocal sound then the guys. They went on the show Eurovision twice. The second time, in 1974, they won with the song “Waterloo” and the rest is history. They had hit after hit for 8 years.

Eurovision Waterloo Performance by ABBA

Within the museum they had recreated the Studio where most of their songs were recorded and a room from a cottage on an island near Stockholm where they created a lot of their songs. They gave a lot of credit to their sound engineer for helping them create the ABBA sound.

As 6:30 came around it was time to leave the ABBA Museum and walk next door to Mamma Mia the Party, inside Grona Lund Amusement Park. It's a dinner theater show set in the restaurant that Meryl Streep's character in the movie wanted to open. It was her dream to open this restaurant.

The food was served family style. We sat with two other couples. One from Washington DC and one local couple who were there celebrating his 60th birthday.

The food was really surprisingly good, even the Greek yogurt for dessert was sweet. We started with bread, already on the table, then a salad, and then some show.

All the speaking parts were in Swedish, but, of course, what we came for were the songs and they were done in English. All of the performers were excellent. They used a lot of Mamma Mia songs, but a lot of times in a different way. The plot is not from "Mamma Mia, the Musical", which was hard to figure out, because it was in Swedish, but after they did some joke about the movie, our Swedish table mate told us that it wasn't the movie plot, it was after the movie and she opened the restaurant she always wanted to. But the characters in the movie didn't line up with the characters in the show, so we are still unsure.

The actors took a break and we were served dinner - spicy pork, a Swedish meatball kabob thing, potatoes and some vegetables.

When the show ended, the singers stayed and did all the main songs from Mamma Mia. They left the restaurant and a DJ took over spinning ABBA tunes. We stayed until 10:45, then caught the bus right outside Grona Lund. Lots of people were going home at that time. Grona Lund had a concert that evening and it ended around the same time and there were lots of teenagers going home.