Christine Sherrill is certainly not “only 17” any longer — but she’s still having the time of her life as a dancing queen in the ABBA-infused hit show, “Mamma Mia!”
And Sherrill’s character’s name isn’t officially “dancing queen” — it’s Donna Sheridan — but it’s probably a title she deserves after performing, by her estimate, more than 2,000 times in the musical, arriving this week at the James M. Nederlander Theatre as part of a 25th anniversary tour.
“Clearly, I can’t go out with the kids in the show,” said Sherrill of how she paces herself for the demanding role. “I practice a lot of yoga. I can’t drink. I can’t talk excessively after the show or socialize.”
There has to be some socializing in Chicago, for a woman whose theater life kicked off here. You may have seen Sherrill, who attended Streamwood High School and Northern Illinois University, at Drury Lane Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, Northlight Theater, Marriott Theatre, and on a host of other local stages.
Sherrill name dropped Sean Allan Krill, a Chicago acting veteran in town to star in “Sunday in the Park with George” at the Studebaker Theater in May. The two have recently been comparing notes, she said, on what it’s like as a more mature actor to handle the nightly rigors of the stage life.
For those who don’t know the show, “Mamma Mia!,” which was also made into a 2008 movie starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth among many others, is about a young woman who invites three middle-aged men to her Greek island wedding in hopes of learning which one is actually her father. Long-buried emotions surface as Donna, Sherrill’s character and the bride’s mother, confronts her past. And what better way to unleash those emotions than with the immortal words of Swedish super band, ABBA?
Sherrill said she’s often asked if she’s grown tired of a musical that she’s been connected to, off and on, since 2006, including a Las Vegas residency production in the early 2000s at the now-defunct Tropicana resort. No, she said, because this version of the show feels “completely different” — even though little about what happens on stage has changed.
“It’s the resurgence of ABBA and the disco venue in younger generations,” she said. “So we’re meeting a lot of young kids who have not even been to musical theater, but they are coming for the ABBA music.”
“Mamma Mia!” encourages audience participation. On this latest tour, audiences have been much more “assertive” than in the past, Sherrill said. From time to time, ushers have had to tell audience members during the show to sit down.
“We may have had one female audience member storm the stage to sing. She didn’t make it …. She was really enamored by Sam (Carmichael, one of Donna’s former flames and played in the show by Victor Wallace),” Sherrill said.
As she prepares to take the stage here in Chicago, Sherrill said she’s grateful for the opportunities she had here that helped launch her career, including being cast as Norma Desmond in the 2012 Drury Lane Theatre production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” for which she won a Jeff Award.
“It brought me into a new career of playing leading ladies; prior to that, I found myself playing a lot of comic relief, … a certain kind of role that was dim,” she said.
She credited former Drury Lane artistic director Bill Osetek with (as the ABBA song goes) taking a chance on her.
“It was a challenge for me, and I felt like he took a risk,” she said.
As for what she’s particularly looking forward to now that’s back in her early theatrical home, Sherrill said: “I’ve already made my Mother’s Day reservations for Petterino’s (restaurant).”