Do you know what’s comforting? ABBA can open a multi-million-pound stage show full of fancy tech. They can create a purpose-built stadium. They can return to the stage as state-of-the-art avatar versions of their younger selves. And yet people will still respond as though they’re 12 gins deep at a wedding disco. On Thursday night, as the opening bars of each song began – the setlist had remained a surprise – all around me are elated cries of “OH! OHHH!!!” This, by the way, is a compliment. ABBA do something to people.
This is not to downplay what a ground-breaking venture this is. There’s a band of 10, a 20-song setlist, and strobes, beads, and domes of light submerge the crowd. It’s an incredible spectacle. Everything has clearly been done, at great expense, to inspire awe – so much so that it’s sometimes hard to know where to look. But what of the ABBAtars? Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s production company, have created digital versions of a younger ABBA that look scarily real. When projected on bigger screens, they do admittedly have a touch of the video game character about them. My brain got a bit preoccupied with whether it could really be tricked into thinking I was at an ABBA concert. My conclusion: it’s better to think of this as an incredibly premium piece of theatre. It still looks like… the future.
