...but everything I have read about this film leads me to strongly suspect that I would hate it. Anthony Lane's review in "The New Yorker" contains the line "The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate."

I think it's one of those things that cuts to the very quick of the snob in every man. It's because I like Abba that the last thing in the world I ever wish to hear is a bunch of actors - or even regular folks - belting their songs out.

We saw friends the other day who had been to see it. She was enthusiastic on the basis that it "was just good pop music". He sat there recalling every inch of the agony and, had he dared speak, the adjective he would have taken most exception to is the word "just".

Deep inside every man is the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, whether it's order a pint of Guinness or sing "The Name Of The Game", and it's this crucial, crippling insistence that movies like "Mamma Mia" ride rough-shod over.

I really hate musicals...! On screen or stage I just can't be doing with them at all.
Films about music, no problem, love them to bits but just the thought of someone like Meryl Streep speaking dialogue and then suddenly bursting into "SOS" just freaks me out.
Is this some kind of musical snobbery?

Pros:
1. Decent pop tunes

Cons:
1. Pierce Brosnan's in it.
2. Pierce Brosnan sings in it.
3. Julie Walters plays an eccentric limey in it.
4. Over-privileged Anglo-American arses cavort in picturesque Aegean locations (in other words, it's just like a Hercule Poirot flick but, as I undestand it, without the incentive of trying to guess which over-privileged Anglo-American arse is going to get horribly murdered next).

No, I don't think I'll be taking a chance on that. A potential DVD + strong spliff job, perhaps, but only if Hellboy 2 hasn't come out by then.

Mrs H and I went a couple of Saturdays ago. It was packed and our screening was definitely a more mature audience, ready to be entertained. Everyone had a whale of a time and applauded at the end. There are moments where the flat-out silliness of it all just wins you over (Pierce Brosnan – see Archie's comments above – leading everyone into "I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do" at the end is just fantastically daft). I don’t remember whether everyone sang along with "Thank You For The Music", all I could hear was people saying how much they’d enjoyed it, which surely is the whole point. Mrs H is going again tonight.

I've read some really sniffy reviews of it but Mark Kermode has it about right.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/videos/kermode_reviews.shtml

What I can't understand is anyone wanting to buy the soundtrack album when it’s being displayed on the shelves next to "Abba Gold". I accepted the actors singing the songs as being a necessary evil and some of them were pretty good, but I wouldn't rush to hear them do it again.

The basic premise is that Sophie has no idea who her father is because her mum was such an old slapper that she was shagging three blokes at the same time (although not all at once)? What a lovely, heart warming story - a veritable feast of family fun.

... the stage show certainly casts a spell of some sort. Every year without fail, my cousin (normally a perfectly sensible lady of a certain age) insists on going to see it on her birthday, and seems to enjoy it more each time. I actually don't know anyone who's seen it who doesn't love it, but on the basis that it's the original "show that you walk into humming the tunes", one imagines that most punters have made up their minds in advance either way, and if you really hate Abba or musicals, you'd be rather unlucky to find yourself in the theatre in the first place...

Oh, christ, I'd blocked the name of that effort from my mind until dredging it up to reply to this.

'Tonight's The Night' was the short lived musical based on the songs of Rod Stewart, and was Ben Elton's follow-up to the still running 'We Will Rock You'. Somehow, fate conspired to award me and my partner of the time with a pair of tickets. I have never ever been more embarrassed for a group of performers in my life - they were great at what they did, but you could see on their faces that they knew just how awful it was.

It was written with clunking inevitability - hello, female character called Baby Jane! - although all the way through to the end they didn't manage to crowbar in 'Sailing'. Oh, hang on. It's the climactic wedding scene and someone runs in 'Rod Stewart has lent us his yacht to go on honeymoon with!' 'WE ARE SAILING!'

Mercifully, it ended after that, and we made to leave - but NO! The cast burst in from the rear doors and stopped people leaving, and cajoled everyone into standing up and dancing as they sang a 10 minute medley of all the songs from the show.

You poor bloke. ABBA and Meryl Streep. I need a brown paper bag.........

Whatever about ABBA, what's all this about a right and wrong way to order a pint of Guinness? I know that there's a right and wrong way to pour it, but to order it?

As for feeling alone, I had the same sensation at an Adele gig in May. Full to the rafters with girls waiting to hear (and sing along with) Chasing Pavements. Which meant that for the hour that preceded it, they talked and talked and talked. And then they talked some more. God knows what I was doing there..

I don't mind musicals either, but Mamma Mia is strictly a mum-would-like-it affair

If a film has a healthy dose of exploding cars, gunfire, screaming and tits, is that called a dick flick?

but you'd have to drag me screaming to see Mamma Mia on stage or in the cinema.

I just don't get musicals. I have tried several (including The Producers and The Lion King) and have always been left cold (and numb of arse) by all of them. I think its a combination of lack of familiarity with most of the songs (which won't include Mamma Mia but may explain the glut of these songs collected to become a musical) and the plain silliness that everyone stops speaking, an orchestra kicks in from no where and people then sing at each other with over the top emmotion.

And they're bloody expensive things as well (in the theatre anyway).

My discomfort at being unexpectedly caught in the middle of a mass sing-along masks an envy of people who are relaxed enough to belt out a public rendition of Fernando, or get down on the dance floor and throw shapes to something by the Scissor Sisters. I would join in as well, if a self-sabotaging, streak of narcissism wasn’t constantly reminding me that the end result is likely to be less John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and more Neil Kinnock dancing at a Labour party conference.

Only in my campest, unicorn-strewn fantasies can I imagine myself as the girl with the golden hair, who can hold a room spellbound when she starts to sing. The bald truth is that I am a graceless, middle-aged man, with a metaphorical broom handle wedged a good way up my back passage and a singing voice like the plaintive bellow of a mortally injured wildebeest.

If my life really was a Musical, like Mamma Mia or We Will Rock You, by the final act I would have overcome these inhibitions. Unfortunately the closest I got to being a Musical today was this morning when I played part of a Ry Cooder album, while eating a yoghurt.

I don't find there's any more suspension of disbelief involved in one of the characters bursting into song than I do in watching the average pop video or some bloke on "Later" singing a song as if it's indicative of his personal feelings.

The musical comedy form in its broadest sense has been around for hundreds of years and will probably be around for hundreds more. The thing that would look really bizarre and anomalous to our ancestors is, well, Radiohead for instance.

But "Mamma Mia" isn't strictly a musical. It's what they call a "jukebox musical", essentially built as a vehicle for a load of hits. Interestingly, it has stealthily supplanted another activity that rock liked to flatter itself it had stamped out and that is the community sing-song.

to create a musical based on The Human League. 'They headed to the disco/ and met a wonky haired man/ and soon Susan & Joanne/ were in on the plan' etc. It could be based on a rundown estate, near where there used to be some shops. Waitresses! BMW motorbikes! Dancing as if you're carrying heavy shopping! a narcotic that forges their union!

God, they were brilliant.

would be "SOS", the story of the stalker who ended up marrying Agnetha. Ben Elton, get with it - you've sold one ticket already.

Personally, I really liked it - I've seen it twice, although my beloved has seen it thrice. It's funny, well-acted, and set in beautiful locations. What else do you want on a miserable week night when Britain is collapsing around our ears?

As for the music - I don't mind Abba. Not a rabid fan but I don't dismiss them out of hand as "cheesy", whatever that is. Benny and Bjorn wrote pure, classic pop. No more, no less. If the point of pop music is to create a catchy tune that makes you feel good, then they're pop geniuses (genii? genia?).

My own favourites in the film: Lay All Your Love on Me, which is terrific and has a strangely tense bridge before the chorus that I'd forgotten, and Dancing Queen, a huge production number that is simply joyous. If you're not on a high by the end of it, you're probably dead.

I saw it with my wife and it ain't no 'Sound of Music' - let alone 'Chicago' or 'West Side Story'. What it does offer is songs everyone knows, which gives it that feelgood factor. Julie Walters sells the the sentiment of the film and will probably get an Oscar nomination in the supporting category.
My wife went back a week later with 2 gay guys to see it because they didn't fancy sitting a cinema audiece of women on their own!

I was once invited to a stage performance of RHS and witnessed the ultimate in cringe inducing audience participation. There is something incredibly sad about seeing the husbands of the fat women in suspenders do the timewarp.
I defy any of the Word massive to find anything good to say about a show that is neither Rock nor Horror.