It doesn’t get more intimate in scale than Beaches, a new musical based on Iris Rainer Dart’s 1985 novel. Platonic soulmates meet as kids by the Atlantic City boardwalk, spurring a lifelong opposite-attracts friendship between the prim Bertie (Kelli Barrett) and the brassy Cee Cee (Jessica Vosk). Life gets in the way—lousy moms, loser men, summer stock—but it all comes back to Bertie and Cee Cee, drawn to each other again and again like twin flames.
Ultimately, almost nothing matters in the Beaches musical, with a book and lyrics by Dart, except this relationship. That’s the whole point: Bertie and Cee Cee are willing more or less to scrap their marriages and careers to support each other. “You’re much more mine than you are his,” the women sing to each other as they get married to other people. So don’t bother getting invested in John (Brent Thiessen), the hunky theater director who romances both besties. Pay even less attention to Michael (Ben Jacoby), Bertie’s uptight beau who laughs at her going to law school. They’re merely two-dimensional distractions from the main event.
A close-quarters story like this one might fit better as a chamber musical, as all of the large-scale numbers, most of which involve Cee Cee performing, strain to fill out a Broadway theater. But when it’s just Cee Cee and Bertie, whether in kid or adult size, Beaches accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. That’s largely because of the performers, not just Vosk and Barrett, well-matched in vocal firepower and persuasively acerbic tenderness, but also the stunning youngsters who play the women as 10-year-olds in flashbacks.
Samantha Schwartz steamrolls in as Cee Cee: “What’s your name, toots?” she hollers, before belting out a variety-show audition while standing on her head. It’s hard to believe this miniature Mae West is actually a kid. And just as Barrett holds her own in stillness and sincerity alongside the maelstrom of Vosk’s commotional passion, so, too, does her junior version, Zeya Grace, impress with her contrastingly honeyed voice. (Less effective are the intermediary teenage versions of the pair who appear in flashback for maybe two minutes, as if they were supposed to be cut from the show but someone forgot to finish the job.)
The script, co-written with the late Thom Thomas and based on the novel rather than on the 1988 film adaptation, is sturdiest when fully focused on the friendship. In the few sequences when Cee Cee and Bertie are absent, including an eminently cuttable duet for their sneering husbands, “God Bless Girlfriends,” Beaches starts to collapse. Since the show is framed around Cee Cee’s flashbacks as she races to be by her friend’s side, how can she be off stage in her memories anyway? And though Vosk channels her boisterous charisma into Cee Cee’s variety performances, part of an apparently world-famous act, it’s not credible that anyone could built a chart-topping career exclusively out of uptempo novelty numbers like these.
But Dart’s lyrics, cleanly crafted but pedestrian in their imagery, get a lot of help from composer Mike Stoller’s snazzy settings. Most of the songs sound closer to ones from the 1950s than the ’80s, but what do you expect from a 93-year-old composer who had a #1 hit, Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock,” in 1957? The tunes get a big lift, too, from Charlie Rosen’s sumptuous orchestrations, which suggest deeper complexity surging beneath the melodies. If only “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” the Grammy-winning Bette Midler song from the film, appeared in a more emotionally honest context than Cee Cee’s grand closing performance.
The production itself, by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart, is both far too big for the story and far too under-resourced for Broadway: This New York stint is a limited run ahead of a national tour in the fall and the set already looks suitcase-ready. Puzzle piece-shaped panels fly in from the wings covered with blurry, collage-like projections that detract from the story.
It helps that the show’s central relationship is more interesting than it is in the film. Here, Bertie and Cee Cee recognize, as they grow up, that as much as they love each other, as a result of being humans, not angels, there are limits to even the closest of ties. “Let’s not pretend you’re going to be here till the end,” Bertie remarks when Cee Cee moves in to take care of her, and Vosk movingly charts Cee Cee’s journey of maturity to try and prove her friend wrong.
When we meet Cee Cee in flashback, she’s been dressed by her stage mother in red sequins and fishnet stockings, all the better to catch the attention of the show biz bigwigs. She’s smart and well-meaning, a kid stuffed into grown-up clothing. Adorable as she is, she doesn’t really fit. Beaches is kind of like that, a lovely little show with a sweet heart that’s all dolled up for a the nearly 2,000-seat Majestic Theatre when it could alight with greater grace somewhere cozier.
Beaches is now running at the Majestic Theatre.
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