Visitors to the Malmö Opera foyer are greeted by a formidable bronze statue of Greek muse Thalia. Tonight, she’s clutching a neatly tied bunch of beautiful balloons. You could say she’s got the look, but then you’d have to add a “la la la la la.” After all, this is the world premiere of Joyride, a new jukebox musical featuring a barrage of bangers from Swedish pop queen Roxette.
Per Gessle, who formed the duo with Marie Fredriksson, is used to filling large international arenas with the band’s power ballads and party anthems. But speaking ahead of the musical’s premiere, he points out that this isn’t the first time Roxette have performed at an opera house – they played Sydney in 2015. The difference with a musical is the ability to work on such a “big scale” with a 34-piece orchestra and a permanent team of craftsmen. “It costs a fortune to do that,” he says. “I’m glad they sold so many tickets!”
Joyride runs until the end of April but is already nearly sold out, such is Roxette’s reputation as perhaps the country’s second-biggest band after Abba. The duo were in their heyday in the late Eighties and early Nineties, when The Look and Listen to Your Heart became US No. 1 hits and It Must Have Been Love, originally a Christmas single, was adapted for a scene in Pretty Woman (with Julia Roberts trembling in a limousine and Richard Gere brooding on a balcony).
“There’s a great sense of nostalgia” for Roxette, says the musical’s British director Guy Unsworth, who highlights how Fredriksson’s death from cancer in 2019 has also deepened fans’ emotional connection to the music. “But I’m excited about the younger generation in the audience who really love it. That’s a big thing here, because Roxette is obviously a bit like the band that Mum and Dad love.”
Gessle had been pitching ideas for a Roxette musical in the UK and US for about a decade. “Everything always fell through because of the scripts,” he says. “A lot of the scripts we got were really dark for one reason or another. I thought we should do something with a happy feel.” The right source material came in the form of Jane Fallon’s comedic revenge novel Got You Back , adapted by Unsworth (from an original book by Klas Abrahamsson). The story follows two women, Stephanie and Katie, as they discover they’re living with the same boyfriend, Joe, who spends half his week in London and the other in Lincoln. If that sounds like a surprising plot for a happy drama, it’s undoubtedly a good fit for numbers about listening to your heart, doing your time and reviewing The Big L , which draws on Gessle’s knack for writing songs before and after a breakup.
When Gessle discussed the song list with Unsworth, he was surprised that the director suggested using album tracks like What’s She Like? and The First Girl on the Moon, in addition to the obvious hits. “Songs I’d almost forgotten about,” Gessle laughs. “I was really impressed that he’d dug into the back catalogue. The musical captures the quirky mix of zany humor and lovesick melancholy that pop fans associate with the elfin, shell-shocked Gessle and the statuesque, peroxide-blonde Fredriksson.
What’s clear from the show’s opening is that Joyride was made with the love of a superfan. It’s filled with inside jokes and references: Dressed for Success , which chronicles Joe and Stephanie’s morning preparations, features choreography reminiscent of a commuter train, performed by a trench-coated ensemble reminiscent of the mischievously marching dancers in the single’s video. There’s a red sports car, reminiscent of the Joyride promo (“Hello, you fool!” is a character’s catchphrase), and Fading Like a Flower features a lineup of female dancers in outrageous white shirts that could have come straight from MTV’s heyday. A subplot resembling a particularly bizarre episode of Emily in Paris involves a celebrity gossip magazine called The Look, an arrogant starlet named Dangerous , and even a runaway bride—perhaps a nod to the film that reunited Gere and Roberts.
With a script in Swedish (there are English surtitles), the musical retains some of Fallon’s British names and her locations, so that the more eccentric moments feature a line of waxed Lincoln farmers chanting “na na na.” Some of the songs do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it’s best to just go with the improbabilities of the storyline and enjoy Joakim Hallin’s arrangements that ramp up the stirring emotions. The verses of Crash! Boom! Bang! are delivered with vigor by Jessica Marberger and Marsha Songcome, who play the two women in the love triangle, and other numbers are similarly reframed. “A couple of Marie’s big ballads, including Queen of Rain, are sung by a man [Alexander Lycke] “What’s interesting,” Gessle says. “Marie actually sang that about herself, but [in the musical] He says it about a woman.”
In a nice touch, Stephanie and Joe’s daughter, Stella (Sara Stjernfeldt), is an aspiring singer-songwriter who we see composing a song on her acoustic guitar. Gessle, who’s used to a certain amount of autonomy as a musician, found that this time around “I had to let go, trust people and learn a little bit more about how the music business works, because it’s a different style of singing … My first band came out of the new wave scene in the ’70s — that’s in my DNA.” Unsworth says he wanted to strike a balance between the band’s feel-good, up-tempo numbers that “everyone wants to sing and dance along to” and the power ballads that “are heartbreaking for a lot of people.” At the same time, he wanted to make sure that “the story moves through the music” rather than having the plot be frequently interrupted for song and dance breaks.
Earlier this year, Mamma Mia! celebrated its 25th anniversary in the West End; an estimated 70 million people worldwide have seen the Abba musical. Unsworth jokes that friends have asked him: “Is that the kind of little ghost that haunts you?” Roxette may not have quite the same reach, but Gessle comments on their not-so-shabby monthly Spotify listeners (14.3 million). He’s about to tour South Africa and Australia with his outfit PG Roxette, performing the hits with longtime friend Lena Philipsson.
After Fredriksson’s death, Gessle “tried to figure out what to do with the catalog,” he explains. “I felt like there were only two options left. One was to just shut everything down and let it happen; the other was to find a singer who could help me sing the songs, and that’s easier said than done.” He and Philipsson talked about it at length. “I told her we’re not going to do anything new—I’m hiring you to sing Roxette. It’s not about creating a new success.” And how does it feel, at 65, to still be singing them? “Just very happy and proud,” he says, adding somewhat shyly: “I wrote these songs, you know? I just think, why not play them if people want to hear them? I don’t force anyone, but the response has been tremendous.”
The tour can’t help but be a kind of tribute to Fredriksson, as can Joyride, which features a projection of the singer’s face toward the end. “I remember buying Jesus Christ Superstar when I was a kid, but this is new to me,” says Gessle. “Marie always loved musicals much more than I did.”