Menopause The Musical
November 21-23, 7:30pm
Spatz Theatre, 1855 Trollope Street
$37-$60
tickethalifax.com
"How often can you be involved with something that delivers such a great feeling to it? The effect is always the same: the laughter, the joy this show brings is palpable, every night," says Mark Zimmerman. He's the Toronto-based producer of Menopause the Musical, back in Halifax this week after a successful 14-show run in 2016.
"It's all about laughing at what you can't change," says actor Janet Martin, who's also Zimmerman's partner and has been touring with the show from the start. "You might as well laugh and embrace it." Set in a Bloomingdale's in New York, the show sees four archetypes of women—a fading soap star, an ex-hippie, a professional and Martin's housewife—discover they're all menopausal. They discuss it and sing about it via Weird Al-style parodies, riffs on songs from the 1960s through the '80s. (Martin offers up "Stayin' Awake" and "Puff, My God I'm Draggin'" as examples.)
But this show, which was written by Jeanie Linders in 2001 and had a four-year off-Broadway run, isn't here to make fun of women of a certain age. "There's a serious underbelly," says Zimmerman. "Through each other you see each other."
Menopause the Musical has toured internationally for nearly a dozen years and is looking forward to getting back to Halifax after that monster run last October.
"It's vocal and so much less reserved than a Toronto or Montreal audience," says Martin. "I'd say the same thing about the west coast. I don't know what it is about the water."