Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: Not starred
Ticketing: Buy tickets to Beaches
In Iris Rainer Dart’s 1985 novel Beaches, the unsinkable singer-actress Cee Cee Bloom—played to the hilt by Bette Midler in the 1988 movie version—begins her career as the saving grace of an otherwise hopeless musical: a performer whose voice, presence and sparkle compel praise no matter how much the show itself disappoints. A similar thing happens in Beaches’s latest incarnation as a Broadway musical. Jessica Vosk is not a newcomer; she’s been rising like cream for the past 15 years, including as Elphaba in Wicked. But her portrayal of Cee Cee marks the first time she has originated a major role on Broadway, and she’s terrific: She grabs you with her warmth and humor and holds you with her vocal power. Midler is a hard act to follow, but Vosk comes out smelling like a rose.
With the exception of its Cee Cee, alas, almost everything about Beaches is C-minus at best. The musical, which covers decades in the evolving best friendship between the vulgar and showbizzy Cee Cee and the rich and pretty Bertie (Kelli Barrett), has had a troubled gestation since its 2014 world premiere in Virginia. Dart herself wrote the lyrics, but her collaborator on the book, Thom Thomas, died in 2015. The show’s original composer departed the project, to be replaced by songwriting legend Mike Stoller, now 93, who co-wrote some of pop music’s biggest hits of the 1950s and 1960s. The scars and amputations from all this show doctoring are in painful evidence in the final product, which limps into the Majestic Theatre seeming already winded.
Following Broadway’s recently ubiquitous Rule of Three, Cee Cee and Bertie are played at different ages by three actors apiece. (See also: Fun Home, Summer, The Cher Show, The Notebook.) The actors playing the youngest and the oldest versions play only those characters throughout the show, but the other eight actors are overworked into multiple roles; this is hardest on the two men, one of whom plays 10 parts and the other 15. The smallness of the cast seems less like an artistic strategy than a cost-cutting measure, especially given the rest of this strikingly cheap-looking production, directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart. Unconvincing sand dunes are plopped at the front of the stage, but there is otherwise almost no set: just a few Jenga-stack panels that move across the stage or down from the ceiling. The costumes alternate between chintzy and drab. When one of the risers pops forward in the show’s finale—moving Vosk toward us as she soars through that oddly backhanded gratitude anthem “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the musical’s only holdover number from the film—the dinkiness of the gesture in no way suggests flight.
Dart’s libretto is equally shabby. Several improvements that were made for the movie have been reversed, most damagingly in the major fight that threatens to end the central friendship forever; it now emerges implausibly from a comment about stemware and relies on the hoary dramatic cliché of someone walking in on a kiss at exactly the wrong moment. (The central relationship has nowhere near the depth of either the film or the original novel.) The score includes a few truly terrible sequences, such as a wedding scene (“Holy holy matrimony / Holy moley matrimony”) and a cringeworthy commiseration duet by Cee Cee and Bertie’s husbands (Brent Thiessen and Ben Jacoby, respectively). But mostly it’s just banal and inconsistent, particularly in Bertie’s material. The nine-year-old version (Zeya Grace) is a dainty bookworm who uses the word “quixotically” in her first song, but a few minutes later she’s singing “Looks don’t account for someone’s worth, kid” to the young Cee Cee (Samantha Schwartz), as though she were chomping a cigar. And the adult Bertie is already a thankless enough role without obliging the gifted but unlucky Barrett to sing things like, “At last I am the girl I want to be / Full of joy and laughter and song / I’m finally feeling as if I belong / I adore the brand new me.”
When a Broadway musical doesn’t work, it’s almost never the fault of the actors. It isn’t in this case, either. Some of them even squeeze in some moments of charm; you can see why both women would fall for Thiessen’s languorous director, and Schwartz has camp gusto as the littlest Cee Cee, an already-jaded Atlantic City child star dressed like Baby June in Gypsy if she started the show as a stripper. But Vosk is the principal lifeline here. Now she just deserves a vehicle that isn’t beached.
Beaches. Majestic Theatre (Broadway). Book by Iris Rainer Dart and Thom Thomas. Music by Mike Stoller. Lyrics by Dart. Directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart. With Jessica Vosk, Kelli Barrett, Samantha Schwartz, Zeya Grace, Brent Thiessen, Ben Jacoby. Running time: 2hrs 20mins. One intermission.
Buy tickets to Beaches: Broadway.com
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