Editor’s note: Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Greater Latrobe School District has limited attendance at “Mamma Mia!” to two invited people per participant in the musical. Attendees will be asked to identify the cast member they are representing when they arrive at the senior high auditorium. There will be an additional performance at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday. Details are pending from the district concerning refunds for previously purchased tickets.

When “Mamma Mia!” hits the stage March 13 in the Greater Latrobe Senior High auditorium, audience members will get to see more than 80 high school thespians singing, dancing and acting to a double-album’s worth of classic ABBA songs.

Cast members of the high school musical will get to showcase an array of talents as the tale of romance, laughter and revelations spins out to the lyrics and music of the 1970s Swedish pop group. The numbers in this jukebox musical range from ballads such as “The Winner Takes It All” to the smash hit “Dancing Queen.”

“Latrobe has a longstanding tradition of taking on big casts,” said Allison Duda, who is directing the student production, based on a hit Broadway show and comes more than a decade after a popular 2008 film version. “We have a lot of kids interested in theater and being on stage. They work very hard; there are no divas and there’s no drama backstage.”

The ABBA-inspired show, she said, is an “opportunity for some of our cast members who are actual dancers to have moments where they get to dance and do great choreography to really fun music.” Duda is being assisted by English instructor Rebecca Snyder, choreographer Katie Kertoy, musical director Kelsey Kotun, pit conductor Tim Sheridan, student director Christian Wege, a 17-year-old senior from Unity, and Ron Baughman, technical director and stage manager.

When the lead actors sing solo numbers, they’re often accompanied by a troupe of singers harmonizing from backstage, Duda said, giving the play “a different energy.” Other ensemble singers will function like a Greek chorus — appropriate for the play’s setting at an inn on a Greek island as friends and family gather for a beach wedding, featuring a full-cast production number to “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do.”

Central to the plot are the characters of inn operator “Donna,” played by Morgan Reilly, 15, a sophomore from Unity, and her daughter and the bride-to-be, “Sophie,” portrayed by Anna Soisson, 18, a senior from Unity.

Reilly is among some cast members who had ensemble roles in recent area community theater productions of “Mamma Mia!” and are now moving upstage to depict main characters in the school performances.

At the Geyer Performing Arts Center in Scottdale last year, she “got to observe these really amazing actors and actresses. I take some of what they did and I try to apply it to myself to make my own ‘Donna.’”

Delving into the psyche behind the songs, Reilly said her character is a confident, independent woman who “just decided that being alone is the best option for her. She’s always there for other people, and her daughter is her family. But inside, it feels like there’s something missing.”

Some relationships are renewed, new ones are forged and hilarious situations ensue when “Sophie” secretly invites to her wedding three men — each of whom, based on a peek into her mother’s diary, could be her birth father.

Soisson has been working on her on-stage chemistry with Reilly, particularly for a scene where they have a mother-daughter spat. Moving up from lesser roles in three previous Greater Latrobe musicals, Soisson said taking on one of the central roles in “Mamma Mia!” is “definitely more pressure, but it’s also really fun to work with all the other leads because they’re all so talented.”

The show comes to a rousing finale with a mini-concert of ABBA tunes. “It inspires you to get up and move,” Duda said. She believes the audience, no matter how much or little they know of the ABBA discography, will “walk away with these songs stuck in their head because they’ve been stuck in my head for two months. They’re great, fun songs.”

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