Menopause the Musical, the long-running production billed as celebrating women and “The Change,” just made a transition itself—from the Atrium Showroom at the Luxor to a more intimate space inside the showroom in The Improv at Harrah’s. For Laura Lee O’Connell, who began playing the Iowa Housewife character when the production was inside the legendary Shimmer Cabaret at the Hilton (now Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino), it’s a return to bringing the cast closer to its Las Vegas audiences. “I loved the Hilton,” says O’Connell. “It was a great first experience in that cabaret-type seating. It was wild in there. It was so much fun.”
While O’Connell thinks the traditional theater seating allows for better sight lines than in some smaller showrooms, it also puts more distance between four cast members and the “fifth girlfriend”—the audience. “Now there’s the least distance of all because they’re literally right at our feet. I mean, we can’t have eaten garlic or pass gas or anything,” she jokes. “They’re just right there, which is great because I really do feel like the audience lets their hair down more and relaxes into it, and they feel like we’re coming to them, like right to them, and there’s no space between us.”
Bonding is an important part of Menopause the Musical. The show depicts four women at Bloomingdale’s in New York City, where the Professional Woman (Lisa Mack), Soap Star (Paige O’Hara), Earth Mother (Vita Corimbi) and Iowa Housewife meet while shopping for, and fighting over, intimate apparel. O’Connell’s character delivers the first great laugh of the night (“It’s my size … I found it first!”) before the women begin comically commiserating over hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss and borderline psychotic episodes.
They also frequently burst into song, delivering a string of musical parodies based on hits from the ’60s through the ’80s. Some get topically reworked, such as chart-toppers by Aretha Franklin (“Change, Change, Change”), Sonny & Cher (“I’m No Babe, Ma”) and the Bee Gees (“Stayin’ Awake/Night Sweatin’”). Other parodies retain the source’s titles, with “Good Vibrations” providing a soundtrack to Iowa Housewife’s introduction to sex toys, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” allowing Mack to bust out her dynamic Tina Turner impersonation, and “New Attitude” embodying the play’s positive themes. By the end of the show the “fifth girlfriends” are invited to dance onstage, and the bonding is complete.
It’s a different world now than when creator Jeanie Linders debuted Menopause The Musical in a theater at a struggling Orlando tourist attraction in March 2001. The production has been staged internationally and translated into Spanish. “The play was written by a woman who had never written a play before,” says O’Connell. “And over glasses of wine and emails with friends she started doing these parodies. Her goal—and she stuck to it and achieved it—was to not criticize the condition, and not be critical of men or complain about the condition that she was feeling. It’s very positive and affirming, and celebrating.”
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