By Helen Musa

Middle Raged – A Musical Meltdown, about to premiere at The Playhouse, is the brainchild of two former Canberrans, performer Queenie van de Zandt and writer-producer Tiffany Noack.

Directed by Priscilla Jackman, the production features a top cast including van de Zandt herself, Valerie Bader, Carita Farrer Spencer and Zuleika Khan, along with an all-female band on stage.

The show includes hilarious songs made famous by artists such as Missy Higgins, Sia and Pink, alongside original numbers by Gillian Cosgriff and musical theatre star Laura Murphy. Tim Minchin, a friend of van de Zandt, wrote them an extra verse for his song Carry You.

When I catch up with van de Zandt by phone at her home in Melbourne, I first tackle the elephant in the room: the fact that the already-famous American show Menopause The Musical, now in its 25th year, is coming to Canberra Theatre in October.

“We feel like we’ve taken the baton from them and gone a step further in creating a fun night out for the girls,” van de Zandt tells me.

“But no-one can take away from Menopause The Musical the fact that it got that word, menopause, out into the public arena, just as The Vagina Monologues got the word vagina into everyday use.

“We feel there’s been a lack of education around what menopause means, too. But we knew our show had to be entertaining and funny if it was going to educate people.”

Van de Zandt and Noack have formed a company called Women With Pockets specifically to stage the show. The name comes from Noack’s fascination with the sexist issue that men’s clothes routinely have pockets while women’s clothes often do not.

Together they pitched the show successfully to venues including theatre centres in Penrith, Wagga Wagga and Canberra, where it opens.

“Tiffany and I have been friends since the 1990s,” van de Zandt says. “We both started out in Canberra, so this is a full-circle moment.”

Van de Zandt needs little introduction to Canberra audiences.

Already a budding star while attending Daramalan College, she wowed audiences at the School of Arts Café in Queanbeyan with her rock soprano voice, and also played leading roles in Canberra Philharmonic Society productions before moving into professional theatre in Sydney in 1992.

In 2013 she relocated to Melbourne to play the role of Cassandra in King Kong. A career highlight was her one-woman show BLUE: The Songs of Joni Mitchell and in 2018 she came home to perform Killer Queen in We Will Rock You at the AIS Arena.

In recent years she has become especially well known for her comic alter ego Jan van de Stool, complete with an outrageous Dutch accent borrowed from her mother, Ria.

Mother to nine-year-old Billie, van de Zandt says Billie will spend some time with grandparents in Canberra while she’s in town.

The idea for Middle Raged emerged shortly after covid when the pair were sitting around at a 50th birthday party with a group of women.

“Then somebody brought up menopause and suddenly the whole night took off,” van de Zandt recalls.

“People were saying, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got that too,’ and then I said to the room, ‘We’re not middle-aged… we’re middle RAGED’.”

“Tiffany got back to me next morning and said, ‘You have to write a show with that title and I have to produce it’.”

Van de Zandt and Noack spent the next five years collecting real stories from women across Australia, so the show touches on many experiences common at this stage of life, including losing parents, challenges in the workplace and invisibility.

Anyone who knows van de Zandt would agree she is anything but invisible. She turns 56 this year, but admits: “I dress loudly, so I don’t really have that invisibility many middle-aged women talk about.

“But one woman in our survey told us a young man had literally walked into her in the street. She stopped still on the spot. He asked why and when she told him, his response was, ‘Did I?’ She really was that invisible.

“We’d love to educate men and have them be our allies. We very definitely didn’t want to man-bash. Menopause can be very funny and we hope men will grow with us as they learn.”

And it’s fun, less a musical and more of a revue, made to look like a variety show, with the feel of an old Don Lane Show or Sale of the Century.

“We open the show with a feminist karaoke medley,” van de Zandt says. “The rest is full of bangers from the ’80s and ’90s. It’s fun music.”

Middle Raged – A Musical Meltdown, The Playhouse, July 8-11.