Menopause that refreshes

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This article was published 15/07/2010 (5743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The venerable Burton Cummings Theatre can be a sweatbox on a warm summer night.

Fill it with a crowd of mature women who are prone to hot flashes and mood swings, and there might be disrobing in the aisles.

When Menopause The Musical tours in the United States, "hot flash fans" are sold as charitable fundraising items. The fans aren’t available for fluttering here, but women of a certain age will probably have too much fun to care.

The touring musical revue opened a five-performance run at the Burt on Wednesday. In Canada, the 90-minute production goes by the title Menopause Out Loud to avoid confusion with a similar, unrelated Canadian show that predated it, Menopositive! The Musical.

Writer-producer Jeanie Linders, who launched the hit show in Florida in 2001, says it’s an empowering, light-hearted celebration of "the change." The audience becomes a sisterhood, sharing laughter about night sweats, memory loss, fatigue, sexual problems, insomnia, irritability and other discomforts that can come with the mid-life passage.

"Our intent is to honour the audience," says Linders, 61, by phone from Orlando. One woman’s response quoted on the show’s website, she says, is typical: "I walked into your show feeling fat, ugly and unsexy, and I walked out beautiful."

The show is set in Bloomingdale’s department store, where four women — a high-powered professional, a prima donna soap-opera actress, a hippie-ish earth mother and a stay-at-home mom from Iowa — meet among the bras at a lingerie sale.

They bond over their menopausal woes, expressed in 25 well-known songs of the baby-boomer era, with lyrics rewritten by Linders.

Linders, a former ad executive, first got the idea in the mid-1990s while enduring menopause herself. She was dressed up in a ball gown, about to leave for a formal affair, when a "dripping" hot flash struck. She found herself "standing in front of the freezer, singing the words Hot Flash to the tune of Rod Stewart’s Hot Legs."

She came up with a whole show of menopause-parody oldies. Chain of Fools becomes "Change, change, change/ change of life." Puff the Magic Dragon is reworked as "Puff, my God, I’m draggin’."

My Guy is spun into My Thighs and the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive into Stayin’ Awake. The hormonal hilarity ends with the audience invited onstage to sing and dance.

Though some critics have dismissed Menopause Out Loud as a parade of tired stereotypes strung together with a flimsy plot and chintzy production values, it has proven to be critic-proof.

It’s an estrogen-entertainment juggernaut with multiple casts that ran off-Broadway for nearly four years, runs continuously in Las Vegas and has played in more than 250 U.S. cities. It has toured to 13 countries, including Australia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea, and been seen by more than 11 million people.

Like the stage comedy Girls Only, co-created by former Winnipegger Barbara Gehring, Menopause Out Loud tends to attract women in groups, such as the Red Hat Society. Linders isn’t worried about the run coinciding with the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, she says, because women who are drawn to her show don’t necessarily go to such events.

"A lot of our audience has never been to theatre," she says, adding, "About five per cent of our audience is men. Most of them get dragged in. The majority of them, once they’re through the door, they love the show… You can see them laughing, nudging the women (beside them) and saying, ‘That’s you up there!’"

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca