Menopositive Ages Nicely

By Peter Birnie
The Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, September 28, 1999

Newspaper headlines may trumpet an imminent cure for menopause, but until that flash-free day arrives women can console themselves with a hearty set of laughs about their change of life.

Compared to its first run last year, Menopositive! The Musical is a tighter, faster and funnier show. There are still some soft spots in the story, which tries too hard to stitch together all kinds of awkward threads, but the original cast still generates enough energy that Saturday night's opening of the reworked version made me forget all about having spent 18 hours without electricity thanks to the weekend's winds.

In this story of four women who meet to create a musical revue for their high school's 35th anniversary, Susinn McFarlane and Ann Warn Pegg still stand out. McFarlen's character Kate feels the fullest and Pegg continues to steal the show with her brassy Hungarian, Zsu Zsu. Patricia Dahlquist is still winningly patrician as Marnie, and Candace O'Connor has found her voice as timid Cynthia.

With all four women at the top of their form, the "note-perfect and drop-dead gorgeous" harmonies I noted last year are still one of the show's biggest selling points. The songs by playwright J.J. McColl (with Rueben Gurr) still present some vocal challenges and a variety of styles, from the country-ballad beats of Fool fer Love and the hilarious Parsley on His Plate to blues and flamenco.

Pegg still stops the show with the full-on Here I am and McFarlen finds some amazing trills for Little Bird. Dahlquist deals well with Dance in the Meadow, a song about child abuse, although it remains a sudden and unnecessary sore thumb sticking out from the storyline.

Donna Spencer directs with an eye to the upcoming Menopositive! tour across B.C. That means Ted Roberts' set has to travel, and its functional elements of a high-school auditorium at centre stage and a dressing room behind a stage-right scrim actually work far more effectively than the original non-set. Add in Mary Lou Brien's tidy choreography and we get a quartet of seasoned performers in a nicely matured musical.