Flash in the Pan

So last weekend, I was at Crown Center, that Hall family shopping palace once so regal in its bearing that Mom always had to deck me out in church clothes before I could warm the lap of its Santa. There, I watched a kid skipping up and down the stairs of the American Heartland, hawking “Hot Flash Fans” to the 200 or so women girls-night-outing it to Menopause the Musical, a wildly popular mash-up of oldies revue, health-class filmstrip and View-style gabfest that’s almost as entertaining as it is silly.

And good lord, it’s silly.

The ladies had left their husbands at home, the dears, along with their critical capacities, which is the only way to go. Thus unburdened, they were roaring from the show’s opening moments. As the women onstage squabbled, improbably, over bras at a Bloomingdale’s sale, the crowd clapped along. As the actresses belted into boomer pop standards made over, “Weird” Al-style, into menopause-specific parodies, they slapped knees and turned to check on one another. When a character moaned, “My hourglass shape has become a glass of water,” or when talk turned to how night sweats on silk sheets feels damned cold, or when the leads waved those Hot Flash Fans up their own skirts, I feared that the American Heartland staff might need to drop oxygen masks. In short, the Menopause crowd laps up this show like a puppy slurping from a garden hose.

So it’s a hit. The Heartland is running it so long that its next show has Christmas in the title. It’s also good enough at almost everything it attempts that I can promise this: If you think you might enjoy Menopause the Musical, I can’t imagine that you won’t.

For the rest of us, it’s a mostly painless evening, packed with songs you hear at weddings and almost no stab at any kind of depth, all highlighted by some big laughs that come more from the strong comic actresses than from Jeanie Linders’ thin script.

Playing characters identified only by labels such as “Earth Mother” or “Soap Star” who choose to spend their day talking menopause at Bloomingdale’s, the cast is uniformly funny, essaying their one-liners with tart vigor and even working a conversational snap into the joke lyrics, many of which demand some tricky phrasing. Fredena J. Williams leads as Power Woman, an executive type with a personal assistant and pipes you could build a church in. She sings more than the rest, bringing down the house with her deep-soul treatment of various hot-flash oldies, putting real guts into trifling material. The hilarious Teri Adams contributes mightily as Iowa Housewife, speaking with a cutesy-poo trill that saves a cheap running gag about hustling away to use the bathroom. Her uptight Iowan’s brush with sex toys —a surprisingly ribald sequence capped with “Good Vibrations” — led to gasps and coos that shook the theater. Also good: Licia Watson, as the Soap Star, and understudy Julie O’Rourke (fitting in seamlessly for an absent Debra Bluford). The ladies bring it and own it.

The combination of the cast, near-soccer-hooligan levels of audience enthusiasm, and some preshow fortification from the Heartland’s bar had me ready to forgive Menopause‘s shallowness. No matter that the script is a plotless mess, less half-baked than still unkneaded in the mixing bowl. Nor does it seem worth bitching that a third of the song parodies (there are about 25 of them) are either one- or no-joke disasters that get an initial laugh and then try our patience: Adapting “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” into a story about consigning husbands to couches is cute, especially when the four leads jam along with the crack Heartland band on wooden spoons and pepper mills. But mangling “Chain of Fools” into “Change of Life” or “I Got You, Babe” into “I’m No Babe, Mom” — a meter-be-damned complaint about how even the mothers of 50-year-olds still meddle — reveals some desperation to fill out the 90 minutes.

I had no sizable reservation until the thunderous standing O, when my friend, a gal still closer to the start of puberty than she is to the end of estrogen, whispered: “Once I’m past 40, I’m killing myself.”

This show — reputedly a celebration — had kind of terrified her. And I can see why. Instead of coming to terms with their new bodies or finding some measure of freedom in a post-reproductive world or guiding their enraptured audience with hard-won wisdom, our gabby quartet abruptly settles for spangly new dresses and a “New Attitude,” the rousing yet empty Pointer Sisters song.

This audience deserves better. For 80 minutes, Menopause tells us little about aging except that it’s miserable: You’ll never sleep, fuck or enjoy yourself again. Then it gives us a shopping spree and some worn-out positivity and invites us onstage to dance to “YMCA,” here leadenly rechristened “This Is Your Day.”

Filing out, I understood. Buy things, and your problems go away. This is Crown Center, after all.