Gary Raffanelli was bluffing that day about 20 years ago when he told producers at Harrah’s casinos in Vegas that he had an ABBA tribute show ready to roll.
He didn’t.
He threw out ABBA because he had been listening to the iconic band’s music right before that casino meeting.
He had pitched an Elton John show and two other concepts; they loved both. Then the producer asked for just one more.
He didn’t have a fourth one up his sleeve.
So he bluffed that his ABBA show was in production.
The producer got so excited that he ordered everyone in the room to keep quiet. Apparently he worried that someone would steal the idea.
“I told him the show wouldn’t be ready for eight months,” Raffanelli recalled.
Then he scrambled to find the perfect cast to pull off the 1970s Swedish hit-making pop quartet whose catchy songs were the basis for the jukebox Broadway musical “Mamma Mia!”
In a twist of irony, the excited Vegas producer was gone before Raffanelli, who took the role of Benny Andersson, was ready to launch the show. But he had no problem finding a home for “Abbacadabra,” which looks at the band from the time the two married couples — Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus and Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — divorced in 1980.
“There’s that friction and a little bit of fighting,” said Raffanelli, who saw ABBA live in 1979 outside San Francisco and during that show, Ulvaeus announced his pending divorce from the stage “and I heard 9,000 people go, ‘Ahhhhhh.’”
In the 19 years since he launched “Abbacadabra,” it has become one of the leading ABBA tribute shows touring the U.S.
The show makes its Tucson debut on Saturday, Sept. 30, headlining the 46th annual Tucson Pride Festival at Reid Park.
Raffanelli and his castmates — Lesley Green as Frida, Susie Campbell as Agnetha and Rich Hamelin as Björn — have been doing the show together for 14 years with a singular goal: perform the songs “as close to the record as we could possibly get them,” Raffanelli said.
The show will feel like you’re spinning through ABBA’s greatest hits recreated live in a way that might take you back to the late 1970s-early ‘80s when those hits were Top 40 radio mainstays. The quartet, backed by a full band, draws from a setlist that includes “S.O.S.,” “Super Trooper,” “Mamma Mia,” “Dancing Queen,” “Waterloo,” “The Winner Takes It All,” “Fernando,” “Take a Chance on Me” and “Voulez Vous.” In between songs, the band interacts with the audience and they become characters in this divorce drama/tension playing out on stage.
The Tucson show is one of about 80 that “Abbacadabra” will do this year.
“There isn’t an ABBA band working that much in the United States,” said Raffanelli, who said he has only missed five or six shows in the 19 years he has been doing them. “I believe we are the biggest and the best.”
Tucson Pride Festival runs from noon to 10 p.m. at Reid Park’s DeMeester Performance Center, 900 S. Randolph Way.
General admission is $15 in advance, $20 the day of the event at tucsonpride.org. VIP tickets are $100 in advance, $150 at the gate. Tickets for students, seniors, civil servants and veterans are $15.
