Single mother Susie McMonagle plays a like role in Mamma Mia!

Joan Marcus

Susie McMonagle likes to joke that selling real estate has become such a dead-end profession of late that she was forced to head out on the road and sing.

McMonagle, a Realtor and hockey mom, has been touring for most of the past year as Donna Sheridan, the ex-rocker whose soon-to-be-wed daughter goes looking for her real dad in Mamma Mia!, the popular musical that comes to the Providence Performing Arts Center on Tuesday. It’s the first time she’s been out on tour in a dozen years, she said.

McMonagle has mostly been doing straight theater in the Chicago area, and is, in fact, up for a part at the Goodman in a Tom Stoppard play. She also has two sons, Elliot, 10 and Jack, 14, which makes touring difficult.

“It’s pretty hard to juggle it all,” she said from a coffee shop in Evanston, Ill., where she was on a two-week break from the show.

The 46-year-old single mom has done quite a bit of musical theater in the past, and was once on Broadway in Les Miserables. Other shows include Evita, Miss Saigon, Cats and Man of La Mancha.

But when her sons came along, she decided to settle in the Chicago area and turn to selling real estate along with legit theater.

“You have to put together a mishmash of jobs to survive,” she said.

Her children are now old enough, though, to join her every few weeks on the road. Sometimes they sit in the orchestra pit with the traveling rock band during performances, or hang out back stage. When they are not on the road with her they stay with their dad in Evanston.

“They dig it for sure,” she said.

McMonagle was trained as a dramatic actress at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., and never appeared in musicals when she was in school, she said.

But she always loved to sing. When she performed a song from Mamma Mia! at a concert in Chicago’s Grant Park a couple of years ago, friends said she’d be perfect for the part of Donna.

“I passed on the show on more than one occasion,” said McMonagle. But she said she saw the Mamma Mia! tour as a way to get out of debt, and decided to audition in New York. She joined the tour last February.

Local theater fans may recognize McMonagle from an appearance about eight years ago at Theatre by the Sea in Matunuck, where she was in Pump Boys and Dinettes. Her kids joined her for that run and they lived in a cottage right on the beach, a stay that left fond memories of the area.

Mamma Mia! is among the more popular shows to play PPAC. Fans never seem to tire of the light-hearted story about the wedding of Donna’s daughter, Sophie, and the search for her real father. And they seem to love the clean, pulsing music of the Swedish pop band ABBA that forms the score, tunes like “Dancing Queen,” “Super Trouper” and “Mamma Mia”

In the show, Donna, who once belonged to a girl band called Donna and the Dynamos, has now settled on a Greek isle where she runs a taverna. Twenty-year-old daughter Sophie plans to marry her fiancé Sky there, and would like to walk down the aisle with her father. The trouble is, she doesn’t know who he is. She finds an old diary of her mother, though, which refers to three ex-lovers. She invites the trio to her wedding, in hopes of finding her dad.

The part of Donna requires a lot of vocal stamina, said McMonagle, who is self-taught with no formal training as a singer. She has to perform a dozen rock songs eight nights a week.

And she has to find a way to keep the material fresh.

“We have to keep it real,” said McMonagle, who leaves the tour in February. “We have a really good group of people right now who challenge one another to keep things honest.”

But McMonagle doesn’t make a big deal out of the show.

It’s meant to be little more than an entertaining night out, a couple of hours of theatrical fluff that should “just wash over you,” she said.

“It’s a guilty pleasure,” she said, “the type of show you can walk out of feeling good.”

Mamma Mia! opens on Tuesday and runs through Sunday at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., Providence. Tickets are $71-$44. Call (401) 421-2787 or log on to www.ppacri.org.|

cgray@projo.com