More than a decade after its premiere at Virginia’s Signature Theatre, the stage adaptation of the 1988 big-screen melodrama Beaches has washed up on Broadway. Time and many years of development have not served this waterlogged mess of a musical well. Iris Rainer Dart, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, has adapted her story for the screen (with the credited assistance of Thom Thomas) — and she hues more closely to her original book, which will doubtless shock fans of the Bette Midler-Barbara Hershey movie.
The basic structure is the same. Celebrated music star Cee Cee Bloom (Jessica Vosk) is about to perform her hit CBS variety show when she gets a call and drops everything to run to the side of her on-again-off-again bestie from childhood, Bertie White (Kelli Barrett). The rest of the story is a series of flashbacks, starting with our heroines meeting as kids on the beach at Atlantic City, where Cee Cee (played by the scene-stealing Samantha Schwartz) is a brash vaudevillian quick with a Borscht Belt punchline and Bertie (Zeya Grace) is a prim suburbanite afraid to remove her white gloves or dip her toes in the water.
But on stage, it’s harder to see what the two see in each other that would maintain a mostly correspondence-based friendship over the next three decades. We’re told that Bertie admires Cee Cee for her raw talent and fearlessness in pursuing it, while Cee Cee envies her well-heeled pal’s intelligence. But the fact is that this is a musical where Bertie actually sings — and very well indeed. Barrett brings an unshowy clarion tone to pleasant but unmemorable new songs by legendary rock songwriter Mike Stoller — whose hits with partner Jerry Leiber include “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hound Dog,” “Stand by Me,” and, appropriately enough, “On Broadway.”
Worse, Dart has restored elements of the book that amplify the disconnect. Bertie, who had the WASPier name Hillary Whitney on screen, no longer bucks the expectations of her prissy mom (Lael Van Keuren) to become a go-getting lawyer for the ACLU. After a brief rebellious post-college summer with Cee Cee in a regional theater, where she hooks up with the director (Brent Thiessen) for whom Cee Cee has been pining, Bertie spends most of her adulthood as the suburban housewife of a millionaire cad (Ben Jacoby). Naturally, he makes an awkward pass at a married Cee Cee — proving his boner fides — but Bertie stumbles on the scene and immediately misconstrues who’s to blame. It’s a chapter of the book that was wisely dropped from the film but that’s restored here to justify keeping our heroines apart — and to set up a series of apology songs that lead to a final reconciliation. Barrett does what she can, but she’s been saddled with one of the most unsympathetic, retrograde roles in recent Broadway history.
The good news is that Vosk is phenomenal, a spitfire with a heaven-sent voice who suggests the outrageous talent and energy of Midler without ever lapsing into imitation — even when delivering the curtain-closing hit “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the lone song from the movie soundtrack. (The actress faces added challenges making the role her own since Tracy Christensen’s Vegas-adjacent costumes and J. Jared Janas’s wigs, hair, and makeup all lean into the Divine Miss M’s signature looks.) Directors Lonny Price and Matt Cowart keep the story lumbering along — but the arrangement of scenes and the brief transitions between them can add to the narrative confusion. We don’t always grasp where we are or how much time has passed. Nor do we really need the pint-size Bertie and Cee Cee to keep popping up and delivering all-too-knowing one-liners, at one point appearing in one of the Majestic Theatre’s box seats like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show.
Thiessen and Jacoby, the only men in the main cast, are saddled with seriously underwritten roles that deserve to be on the periphery: This is essentially a rom-com about two women, and the guys are merely obstacles to the couple getting together in the end. The actors even team up for a duet to wallow in their second-fiddle status and improbably lament, “I wish I could diagnose / why men never get that close.” (Dart’s lyrics tend to be very on the nose.) Hint: It’s not about you. It was never about you. This show misses so much of what made Beaches a phenomenon, in addition to an attention-grabbing turn by Midler in her prime. Filmgoers, women especially, were drawn to the focus on a longtime, entirely platonic female friendship as something that’s every bit as emotionally satisfying as any traditional boy-meets-girl romance. There’s not much that’s satisfying about the flotsam that’s washed up on the shores of the Majestic. ★★☆☆☆
BEACHES
Majestic Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through Sept. 6 for $54 to $311