After the former
ABBA members
Benny Andersson and
Björn Ulvaeus collaborated with lyricist
Tim Rice on the musical Chess in the mid-'80s, they next turned to a project related to their native country, a musical based on Vilhelm Moberg's series of novels The Emigrants. The series, which tells the story of the Swedish Diaspora to America in the mid-19th century, had previously been adapted into two lengthy films by director Jan Troell, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), both starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow.
Andersson and
Ulvaeus focused on the character Ullmann had played, the wife and mother Kristina, taken by her husband, Karl Oskar, across the sea to the U.S., where the family settles in Minnesota. (By this point in
Andersson and
Ulvaeus' songwriting collaboration, they had largely separated their duties, with
Andersson essentially writing only music and
Ulvaeus only lyrics.) Under the title Kristina från Duvemåla (Kristina from Duvemåla), the show opened on October 7, 1995, with several additional Swedish productions and a recording through the end of the ‘90s. But since, unlike the
ABBA music and Chess, the show was written in Swedish, not English, that was as far as things went for a while. Eventually,
Andersson and
Ulvaeus brought in
Herbert Kretzmer, who had written the English adaptation of French composer
Claude-Michel Schönberg's musical Les Misérables, resulting in a worldwide hit, and he and
Ulvaeus created an English-language version of Kristina, which was given its premiere as a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York in September 2009. This recording is drawn from that performance.
Helen Sjöholm, who created the title role in Sweden, and for whom the part was written, is again playing Kristina. She has a contralto voice reminiscent of
Anni-Frid Lyngstad of
ABBA, but sings in English with less of a Swedish accent.
Andersson's tuneful music, while recognizable to anyone familiar with Chess, has little of the pop/rock sound of
ABBA this time around, although he does throw in a little electric guitar here and there. Rather, his influences are classical and operatic. The show is also strongly suggestive of the musicals of
Schönberg and
Andrew Lloyd Webber. Indeed, Les Misérables is perhaps its nearest antecedent, especially in the big ballads sung by tenor
Kevin Odekirk, who plays the tragic younger brother Robert, "Down to the Sea" and "Gold Can Turn to Sand." The story is not so much like opera as it is like soap opera, however, a kind of domestic melodrama about the travails of a struggling family and its friends. That can make the music seem heavy-handed at times, although
Andersson does have some fun with what must be the only song ever written about "Lice" (they infest the ship on the way over to America) and on "American Man," the emigrants' first encounter with an atypical citizen of the new land.
Louise Pitre, who starred in
Andersson and
Ulvaeus' Mamma Mia! on Broadway, has a juicy part as the reformed prostitute Ulrika, but ultimately it's
Sjöholm who makes the strongest impression, clearly bringing the audience to its feet with her climactic ballad (or, as they call it in the musical theater, the 11 o'clock number) "You Have to Be There," in which Kristina addresses God. Kristina may or may not have a future on-stage, even in English, but it should be of interest to anyone who likes the music of the creative team from
ABBA. ~ William Ruhlmann