These moms are rock stars

Susan Bertoia, Barbara Pollard, Alison Kelly, Deborah Williams and Jill Daum perform in an earlier production of Mom’s The Word: Remixed, which comes to Western Canada Theatre next week. For the Kamloops performances, Bertoia — who portrays TRU theatre-arts teacher Robin Nichol — will be replaced by Beverley Elliot.

Ah yes, new motherhood.

Robin Nichol remembers it well.

Tiny baby, all those kitchy-cooing moments — dirty diapers, teething, never-ending-unexplainable crying.

“It was a lot like ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe this is my life’,” the theatre-arts instructor at Thompson Rivers University said.

But, should Nichol’ children be reading this, she’s not referring to reality — much — but, rather, the little moments she shared with her new-mom friends in the theatre, those moments that gave birth to Mom’s The Word.

The play was an instant hit when it

was first staged in Vancouver and has gone on to be performed in many countries.

Building on that foundation — and recognizing their 12 kids were getting older — Nichol and her friends created a second work, Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged.

A third version — Mom’s the Word: Remixed — takes the best of both earlier works and creates a raucous trip through motherhood all the way to one of Nichol’s favourite moments, a song in the second act called Here Comes Menopause.

Remixed will be at Sagebrush Theatre from May 18 to May 20, another bonus to Western Canada Theatre’s season that is being staged as a fundraiser.

Remixed is a full-production stage show, a long way from those first performances of Mom’s the Word, times that were just Nichol and her friends “just up there talking, with a few props from Sally Ann.”

Nichol isn’t in this version; she hasn’t had time to rehearse with her friends so someone else will have her role and she is helping as a script consultant.

But, that doesn’t minimize how important Remixed is for her as she prepares

to face another stage of motherhood: A child moves out of the nest to go to school.

And it brings back fond memories of the original one, when Nichol, Jill Daum, Alison Kelly, Deborah Williams, Linda Carson and Barbara Pollard would perform one night and be out with their infants the next day.

“We were rock stars on the playground,” she said of the creation they did through Saturday-morning get-togethers to create a script, times that were more often than not taken up with laughing and crying at each other’s stories.

Until deadline approached, giving them just three weeks to get it together for opening night.

Ironically, Mom’s the Word ran at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver for nine months before taking off into the world, where it has been translated into 12 languages.

Some lessons the moms took from their experiences: The best age for children is prenatal and, in response to if teens are easier or harder than babies, they agreed the answer has to be “Yes.”

Tickets are $35 and are available at the Kamloops Live Box Office, 1025 Lorne St., 250-374-5483, kamloopslive.com.