I just figured out my own issue which I am hoping might help others if they get stuck in this situation.
Essentially the problem seemed to be that modsecurity caused the 500 Internal Server error because for some reason (which I have yet to understand) the menu page was sending a bunch of data in the response body.
To resolve the problem I just needed to add the following to my vhost.conf file and restart apache. Here I doubled the response body size.
SecResponseBodyLimit 1572864