Donna Sheridan, played by Meryl Streep, left, celebrates the wedding of her daughter Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried, as Sophie’s friends Lisa (Rachel McDowall) and Ali (Ashley Lilley) look on, in Mamma Mia!

Universal Studios / PETER MOUNTA

Mama mia! The international stage sensation Mamma Mia! trips over its platform shoes on the way to the movie screen.

The stage show had the same tiny plot as the film, stitched together by the bouncy, infectious music of ABBA, the Swedish singing group that was an international sensation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On stage, the songs captivated the audience, who wound up singing along and dancing in the aisles. In the film, the singing and dancing is done largely by such unlikely stars as Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, who have hardly made a name for themselves in musicals, and the fragile plot seems even more so when played out on real locations.

In Mamma Mia! a 20-year-old bride-to-be named Sophie lives on a Greek island where her mother owns a crumbling hotel at the top of a hill. Unbeknownst to Mom, Sophie invites three strangers to her wedding, certain that one of them is the father she has never known. “I’ll know him when I see him,” Sophie tells her girlfriends.

But Sophie’s plan goes awry when Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) and Harry (Colin Firth) turn up and she can’t tell them from Tom, Dick or Harry. Which of the three charming lugs will walk Sophie down the aisle is the film’s central crisis. And her mother, aghast at the prospect of seeing three men she had flings with 20 years ago and had never expected to see again, is as clueless as they are as to why they’re there. Well, it’s Sophie’s choice, of course.

This light, daffy premise was a charmer on stage. But in the headlights of reality on the movie screen, it seems phony and overloaded with forced frivolity.

It’s the straw cowboy hat that Streep plops on her head to meet two old girlfriends — former bandmates in the singing group Donna and the Dynamos — that makes one begin to wonder if Mamma Mia! on-screen is headed down the wrong track. Streep as a former hippie with a hayseed hat? Even for the Academy Award-winning actress, it’s a stretch.

Yes, the ABBA soundtrack, mostly written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, is still as cheerfully bouncy as one remembers. But even the insistently sex-charged “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight),” performed by Donna (Streep) and bandmates Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters) and what seems to be the entire female population of the island, comes across as manufactured rather than spontaneous. Worse, the uninspired choreography is more of the jump-up-and-down variety than anything clever or original.

When the actors suddenly break into prerecorded, fully orchestrated song, it’s awkward rather than buoyant. That becomes maddeningly apparent the longer Mamma Mia! goes on. When, near the end of the film, as her daughter’s wedding fast approaches and Donna spills out her heart to Sam in the plaintive “The Winner Takes It All,” there were titters from a preview audience at yet another attempt to craft another ABBA song into the plot.

Amanda Seyfried, as Sophie, and Dominic Cooper as her fiancé Sky, have some of the best voices. But Streep, who sang on screen most recently in A Prairie Home Companion, holds up her end of the musical scale, while Baranski and Walters do well.

But the most painful part of Mamma Mia! is trying to get three non-singing actors to make an impact in this musical. Brosnan and Firth make a game go of it, but are defeated by their inability to carry a tune. British stage and opera director Phyllida Lloyd (who staged the London and Broadway productions of Mamma Mia!) tries to disguise this by having the music ratcheted up loudly when they begin to sing, with an unseen backup chorus often adding their voices as well.

Streep has a funny moment at Donna’s first sight of her three former lovers, whom Sophie has hidden from her mother (she thinks) in the goat shed. Streep, in a mix of anger, curiosity and sexual hunger, dances all over the shed like a caged tiger in heat, bouncing along the roof and hanging upside down to peek into a window to make sure that what she can’t believe is true, all the while singing the title song. It’s funny and exhausting. So, too, is the hedonistic free-for-all production number to “Does Your Mother Know?” and the wacky turn by Donna and the Dynamos, in sequins and platform shoes, to “Super Trouper.”

So there are some buoyantly fun moments, but quickly Mamma Mia! becomes too much of a good thing.

**Mamma Mia!

Starring: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Julie Walters, Christine Baranski, Amanda Seyfried, Dominic Cooper.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com