“Calendar Girls,” now running at Meadow Brook Theatre, is one of those charming, unlikely comedies that we know couldn’t happen in real life—except that it has. And that makes us like it that much more. The play was written by Tom Firth as an adaptation of his original screenplay for the movie of the same name. Both the play and the film were inspired by a group of middle aged women in Yorkshire who, in 1999, found an unorthodox way to raise money, awareness, and a few eyebrows—all to benefit Leukemia research. One of the women in the group had lost a husband to the illness, and they created a charity in his honor, funded by their own nude calendar. It worked, and the women involved became something of a media sensation.

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