Arkansas Online

‘Menopause The Musical’ to be revived at Murry’s

ERIC E. HARRISON

Murry’s Dinner Playhouse audiences attending Jeanie Linders’ “Menopause The Musical,” will notice a lot of similarities from the production that appeared onstage there in almost exactly the same time frame — late May-early July — in 2018.

The cast is the same: Nisheedah Golden plays Power Woman, with Emory Molitor as Soap Star, Monica Clark-Robinson as Earth Mother and Kelley Ponder, also the musical director, as Iowa Housewife.

The director, Don Bolinger, is the same. So is the choreographer, Moriah Patterson. The set design, Bolinger says, should be the same, though some of the set pieces are likely to be different.

“We bought those cubes special,” Molitor says, a little waggishly. (They’re already in position in the studio at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where they’ve been rehearsing.)

What will be different? Four years, including two during part of which the theater was closed, has exacted a few changes in the actresses, who say, “The hair. The bodies. We’ll have different costumes.”

The production opens Wednesday and runs through July 2.

The four characters encounter one another while shopping for lingerie at a Bloomingdale’s and exchange their experiences, in

cluding chocolate cravings, hot flashes, loss of memory, nocturnal sweats and sexual predicaments.

Linders has taken 24 pop tunes from the ’60s and ’70s and rewritten the lyrics to reflect the musical’s subject matter. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” for example, she parodies as “Stayin’ Awake.” “Having a Hot Flash,” of course, is Linders’ version of “Having a Heat Wave.” A song about a magical dragon playmate translates into “Puff, My God I’m Draggin’.”

“I was worried it was not going to be familiar,” Clark-Robinson says. “Before cracking open the script, I only remembered three songs. Then it was, ‘Oh, I remember that. And I remember that, too!’”

“It’s definitely coming back to us,” Ponder says. “There are still things to work on, but we’ve retained much of it.”

The show was a smash success at Murry’s in 2018, much to the surprise of both the cast and the management. Owner-producer Ike Murry McEntire says what ultimately convinced him to pick up a show with a potentially risque title and with potentially risque subject matter was that it was the longest running production in the history of Las Vegas. And any material that might be considered risque is, Clark-Robinson explains, mostly implied.

“We’d been trying to get this show for years,” says McEntire, grandson and namesake of Murry’s founder Ike Murry. “It ran for six weeks; [ticket sales during] the first couple were so-so, and the last four weeks we sold out.

“In the 32 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a response like this. You can see it as people are heading out — it really empowers the audience. Everybody leaves the theater with a positive view of themselves.”

“I was taken by surprise how successful it was,” Ponder recalls. “I was not used [while onstage] to women in the theater screaming at the top of their lungs.”

The show resonated, particularly with women, including many who had not yet undergone “the change.” They told their stories to the performers in the post-show handshake line. Many of them came back to see the show more than once.

“I talked to one woman who went through ‘it’ at 35,” Clark-Robinson recalls. “She told me it was her second time back.”

“I worked with a 20-something woman who couldn’t wait for it to come back,” Molitor adds.

“It’s good, maybe, to see it multiple times,” Ponder says. “There’s so much going on.”

Even men rhapsodized about the show, Clark-Robinson notes: “They would tell us, ‘Now I understand what my wife is going through.’”

She adds that one new thing about reprising the show: After four years, “I now have achieved first-hand some of the menopause symptoms I was reacting to then. Now, when I’m singing about night sweats, I know what it’s all about.”

Murry’s, in the wake of the pandemic, is still on its feet, though it is having the same trouble as most dining establishments in coming up with a full staff, McEntire says.

“It’s been tough the past year or so, but we’re making it,” he says. “We were closed for so long. Getting reopened has been the hardest part.

“We put on four shows last year; we’re back to a full schedule this year.”

The dinner theater, which started as the Old West in 1967, usually stages 10 productions a year, with musical or variety acts filling interstices a couple of weeks each year.

The establishment reopened last year with 1/3 of its total “regular” seating capacity; full capacity now still involves fewer tables to allow for better spacing.

And the kitchen came out of the pandemic with a new head chef, Tracy Philipp, a former Houston caterer, who runs things with the help of longer-term Murry’s veteran Noel Porter; they’ve become adept at doing more with less, McEntire notes.

Meal service, which when the dinner theater reopened consisted of at-table service, has gone back to buffet, with the exception of the carving station — just not enough staff to man it, explains McEntire, who has been pitching in wherever he’s needed.

“I’ve had to bus more tables than when I worked here as a teenager,” he says.

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2022-05-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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