A new holiday musical comedy is premiering next week at Atlanta’s Out Front Theatre Company.
“Mamma Dearest: Here We Joan Again,” comes from playwright and drag performer Blake Fountain, also known as Tugboat. The show is described as an ABBA-inspired holiday comedy that combines the musical “Mamma Mia!” and the 1981 film “Mommie Dearest,” based on Christina Crawford’s memoir of the same name about her tempestuous upbringing under her adoptive mother, the actress Joan Crawford.
The musical follows Christina (Anna Dvorak) as she tries to uncover the identity of her birth mother. When she realizes her mother is one of three Hollywood legends – Bette Davis, Judy Garland, or Eartha Kitt – she invites them all over for a “holiday meltdown of epic proportions.” The cast includes Emily Nedvidek, Bekah Medford, Hope Clayborne, and Jack Caron.
In a written statement, Fountain said that while he originally just set out to write a campy holiday parody, “Mamma Dearest” eventually became about something deeper, especially in regards to chosen family.
“‘Mamma Dearest’ became a way to laugh at the darkness, to take the melodrama I inherited and turn it into something glittering and alive,” Fountain said. “At its core, this show isn’t about Joan Crawford, or ABBA, or even Christmas. It’s about chosen family: the beautiful, chaotic people we gather around us when the ones who were supposed to love us didn’t know how.”
The show runs at Out Front Theatre from Dec. 11-21. Tickets are available online.