Nine years ago, two musicals opened on the London stage within the same April week of each other: the irresistible Mamma Mia! at the Prince Edward and the problematic but brilliant Candide at the National Theatre.

This close conjunction of different types of musical theatre nirvana was dramatically compressed for me yesterday within a few hours: an early screening of the Mamma Mia! movie starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters and Colin Firth, and the ENO premiere of the latest idiotic effort to make theatrical sense of Candide.

What is good about Mamma Mia! is that it makes no effort to get above itself, whereas Candide sinks under the weight of its own misguided pretensions. Cunegonde is Marilyn Monroe, for God’s sake, and a show that starts in the New Age America of JFK’s Camelot and Senator McCarthy’s witchhunt — excuse me, these were not contemporary phenomena — has nowhere to go after the interval: oh yes, back to America which is much nastier now. By then, I didn’t care. Glitter and be gay? Twitter and be damned.

The Borkowski PR machine arranged a very pleasant afternoon screening of Mamma Mia! in the Charlotte Street hotel, which was attended by the more lighter-headed members of the critics’ circle and several other industry insiders. Champagne and sandwiches, tea and cake, helped put us in the mood. Film critics get this kind of treatment all the time. For us, it was a rare surprise.

Mind you, I didn’t need any second bidding. I’d crawl over broken glass to see Meryl Streep in more or less anything these days — her bravura boss bitch in The Devil Wears Prada is one of my all time favourite film performances — and she doesn’t disappoint as Donna, the manager of a run down Greek taverna-cum-hotel whose daughter is getting married with misgivings about her father’s identity — is he Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth or Stellan Skarsgard?

Meryl cares more about this, eventually, than we do, and she achieves one astonishing acting coup in the sequence where she sings “The Winner Takes It All” half way up a Greek island hillock with the wind blowing through her hair and Pierce Brosnan looking at her as if he’s just remembered he left the bathroom lights on.

How Streep makes the dumbo lyrics make any sense at all is destined to become one of the modern cinema’s greatest mysteries, but she goes even beyond that, bypassing Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo as a woman on the brink of emotional and psychological crisis. She is absolutely magnificent, and I suddenly realised I had tears streaming down my face.

Not for long, though! The wedding scene features Niall Buggy as a surprised priest who finds himself singing along at the feast afterwards while Julie Walters tries to perfect her act as a tipsy high wire artiste picking her way through a table full of food before jumping in a spare man’s lap. Sorry, Jules, baby: this comic knockabout is funny the first time, but operates on the diminishing returns principle as the film goes on. Will it be hailed as a good film? Probably not, but the DVD sales should be gigantic.   

Dominic Cooper, poor lad, looks lost in the thankless role of the new groom, but Amanda Seyfried is delightful as the bride and Christine Baranski doing the pelvic jitterbug on the beach should put you off island holidays for ever, in a good way.

And one other sequence, in which the dancing queens progress from the taverna interior down to the quayside and onto the jetty is the funniest, campest thing I’ve seen since Christopher Biggins caught crabs and other slimy creatures in the Australian bush.

All these high spirits were beaten out of me at the ENO, where the new Candide is the worst of all possible productions with the greatest of all possible pretensions. At least I enjoyed my dinner afterwards with novelist Douglas Kennedy.

And I took my second sighting of the day of my neighbour Michael Palin, who was tucking into a feast with a few friends as a just reward for his exertions earlier in the day: we passed each other, huffing and puffing, on our respective mid-morning runs over kite hill on Hampstead Heath. You can’t just turn up for films and musicals without going into serious training, you know.
 

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