Beaches, that tearjerking ’80s tale of female friendship beloved by some, snubbed by others and mostly remembered for Bette Midler’s rendition of the soaring theme song “Wind Beneath My Wings,” has had a long road to the stage, and the wait has done it no favors. Whatever charms the 1988 movie had – and they were slight if soggy – have been washed away like so much sand erosion, leaving the stage cluttered with the flotsom of cartoon characters, broadly drawn performances and some chintzy-looking sets.
Opening tonight on Broadway, Beaches, A New Musical, as the full title has it, is a mostly forgettable endeavor, and that, sadly, includes a score that will not likely takes its place in the treasured legacy of its composer, the great rock & roll songwriter Mike Stoller.
By the time “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the Grammy-winning AOR hit written by Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley, makes its inevitable end-of-show entrance, whatever nostalgia remains is solely for Midler and her signature performance of the song. The new Beaches is most charitably viewed as an oldies act for a movie.
The premise, for anyone who needs reminding, is an odd couple lifelong friendship that survives domineering mothers, long distances, polar opposite personalities, men and misunderstandings, all until a terminal disease does the separating that a long list of previous plot devices couldn’t.
We first meet CeeCee and Bertie (named Hillary in the movie that starred Midler and Barbara Hershey) on an Atlantic City beach when the girls are children, or, more accurately here, tiny adults with all the characteristics they’d take through life. CeeCee (a scene stealing, for better and sometimes worse, Samantha Schwartz, directed to channel both Midler and Mae West) is already something of a boardwalk star, performing in a bright red bustier-style get-up and fishnet stockings, sassing her equally brassy mom (whom she calls by first name Leona) and encouraging milquetoast Bertie to ignore her own stuffy mom’s instructions by dipping a toe or two in the surf. Challenge accepted, friendship born.
Zeya Grace (left) and Samantha Schwartz (right) in ‘Beaches’
Marc J. Franklin
The girls go their separate ways at summer’s end, but their pen-palship continues through their teens and into adulthood. When they reunite as adults they haven’t missed a beat.
The musical’s book by Iris Rainer Dart (who wrote the original 1985 novel) and Thom Thomas takes a vaguely snapshot approach, with quick scenes from the women’s lives – Love Letters-style passages, introductions to the men they love and fight over, and glimpses of CeeCee’s show business rise (she grows up, apparently, not so much to be Bette Midler’s Beaches character but more the Divine Miss M herself, at one point performing at a gay bathhouse and later making variety-show appearances in Midler’s signature ’70s trash-with-flash style beneath an explosion of red hair.
As the adult CeeCee, Jessica Vosk, a fine powerhouse singer, chooses – or is directed to choose – an over-the-top style that draws heavily, naturally enough, from Midler (the outré style, the Merman-esque volume and chanteuse vulnerability). There’s some Streisand, too, and a big dose of Andrea Martin, specifically Martin’s signature SCTV character Edith Prickley, that bawdy, gawdy ham with all the bravado of a Catskills clown. Standard wisecrack: “I look like the girl next door…to a kibbutz!”
Kelli Barrett, as the adult Bertie, is suitably prim and proper, pitched to a more human level than CeeCee but not significantly more convincing. We can only imagine what each of these characters sees in the other aside from plot mandates, with an audience’s sense of ’80s nostalgia required to do some very heavy lifting.
The men in the cast – Ben Jacoby and Brent Thiessen – are suitably smarmy in their stick-thin roles, with the supporting adult actresses – Sarah Bockel and Lael Van Keuren – playing the mothers with caricature zeal. Zurin Villanueva, as a late-in-the-show hospice caretaker, has a refreshing natural ease hinting at a sturdier Beaches that might have been.
Title: Beaches
Venue: Broadway’s Majestic Theatre
Director: Lonny Price and Matt Cowart
Book: Iris Rainer Dart & Thom Thomas
Music: Mike Stoller, with Lyrics by Dart
Cast: Jessica Vosk, Kelli Barrett, Samantha Schwartz, Zeya Grace, Bailey Ryon, Emma Ogea, Ben Jacoby, Brent Thiessen, Sarah Bockel, Lael Van Keuren, Zurin Villanueva, Harper Burns
Running time: 2 hrs 30 min (including intermission)
