“Happily Ever After”: No fairy tale, but better

Ever hear that song "There’s Been a Change in Me," from the musical Beauty and the Beast , and wonder what that princess-to-be would think about the changes to come when youth was no longer on the menu?

Veteran actress Mary Martello, 57, sure did.  She thought it not just about Belle, the character singing that song, but all the other Disney fairy-tale figures whose youth and beauty makes them seem immortal. The result of that question, years later: a play in which Martello, as Belle, leans against the bar of a place called Happily Ever After and confides to the audience: "You know what we have here at Happily Ever After?" She smiles. "Menopause." If that sounds too much like daytime TV, fear not. Happily Ever After , which premiered this week at the Adrienne Theatre in Philadelphia, is a rollicking comedy that feels a little like a cross between Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Wood s and that long-ago British masterpiece h commedia dell’arte, Noises Off .

Those within reach of Philadelphia might want to click here to secure tickets to the play, which runs only to the end of March.

Martello’s Belle runs one of several competitive castle-cleaning companies, a necessity since her prince was lured away by Sleeping Beauty, while her Cinderella (seen above) says it’s of necessity, ever since her Charming invested the palace riches with "some guy named Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi….Who knew?"

As for menopause, Belle and Cinderella both describe it as a liberation. "There was a spell on me all those years from all those hormones," Belle/Martello sighs. Afterward: "Freedom!"

Martello’s jokes, her delivery of songs that include the first Mr. Clean commercial (Prince Charming, gone bald, is the prototype) and her astonishing mastery of physical comedy keep the ball rolling from one episode to the next…

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