The main thing I remember from seeing “Beaches” on the big screen, at the tail end of the 1980s, is the audience. A best-friendship drama starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as women from vastly different worlds who met as children, it stretches over three decades until one of them dies — in cinematically glamorous surroundings, and way too young. At which point I heard in the darkness a gathering symphony of sniffles, until I was surrounded on all sides by people in tears.
That’s what weepies are for, like them or not: safe, even pleasurable, catharsis. And I imagine that the novel the movie is based on, by Iris Rainer Dart, had much the same effect. Margaret Atwood, in 1986, was witheringly accurate when she called it “a sort of Young Adult novel for adults,” but still it made the paperback best-seller lists that summer, appealing to readers’ passions and plucking at their heartstrings.
So it is absolutely bizarre that “Beaches” the musical, which opened on Wednesday night at the Majestic Theater, is a spectacularly unaffecting experience. Based on the novel, which is more of a backstage story than the movie, this adaptation arrives on Broadway a dozen years after its world premiere but seems like a corner-cutting rush job, in too much of a hurry to take the necessary care.
Directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart, the show relies on the good will of an audience at least glancingly familiar with the plot of “Beaches” in its other forms. In 1951, off the boardwalk in Atlantic City, two little girls meet and become pen pals. Cee Cee, a child performer who already swears with abandon, will grow up to be a star. (In Garry Marshall’s movie, she is called CC, and Mayim Bialik played her to perfection.) Bertie, a conscientious student and prim beauty, will follow a more conventional path. (In the film, she’s named Hillary.)
In both the novel and the movie, friction between these opposites — avatars of the Reagan-era career-vs.-motherhood debate — provides the spark of their relationship through the years. But the musical, adapted by Dart (book and lyrics), Thom Thomas (book) and Mike Stoller (music), doesn’t trust that stormy dynamic, preferring the upbeat to the uncomfortable, as if that were what the medium demanded.
The result is a pervasive, underwhelming blandness in a condescending production. Picking up a Broadway imprimatur en route to a national tour, it appears to have forgotten what — beyond the Divine Miss M — drew fans to “Beaches” in the first place.
The musical begins in 1985 in Los Angeles, where Cee Cee (Jessica Vosk) is rehearsing for her eponymous network variety show. Getting an urgent phone call from Bertie (Kelli Barrett), she races to Northern California, where the dying Bertie has chosen to spend her last days.
“So, what are you doin’ here in Carmel?” Cee Cee asks upon arrival.
It’s a reasonable question, since Bertie lives in Florida, but she never explains, and neither does the show. (In the movie, she is from San Francisco and seeks the comfort of her family’s beach house. In the novel, she fell in love with the area when she was falling in love with a man who doesn’t exist in the musical.) This needless mystery, unfortunately, is par for the course.
Bertie’s impending death is the frame for the story of their friendship, the telling of which is distractingly sloppy as the action toggles between 1985 and the past. The set (by James Noone), which has a cut-rate roadshow look, is highly reliant on video (by David Bengali). Yet those changeable surfaces are never used to note what year it is, or where the characters are geographically — details that you will puzzle over, along with how old the adult Cee Cee and Bertie are meant to be at any given time.
Surely, you might think, the costumes (by Tracy Christensen) will clue you in. But a whole long section set at a summer theater suggests, via bell bottoms and fringe, that the year could be anywhere from 1968 to 1975. The script says it’s 1964, which at least explains Bertie’s pillbox hat, and the fact that Cee Cee is just embarking on her grown-up career.
For Bertie, it is the summer before college, yet both she and Cee Cee look like they are in their mid-30s. The production does have actors who earlier, fleetingly, play adolescent versions of Cee Cee and Bertie, but by 1964 Vosk and Barrett have stepped in. That age dissonance makes it awfully challenging to suspend disbelief when the hard-bitten Cee Cee confesses to John (Brent Thiessen), the summer theater’s on-the-prowl artistic director, that she is a virgin.
Then again, it strains credulity when John rebuffs her sexual advance by saying that she is marriage material — which he apparently means, because they do eventually wed. But while their subsequent split makes psychological sense in both the novel’s version of their marriage and the movie’s, onstage it comes out of nowhere.
Emotional rigor is not this show’s forte. It leans on the too-easy humor of the foul-mouthed little Cee Cee (Samantha Schwartz) entertaining the wide-eyed little Bertie (Zeya Grace), and it bets on the sentimental power of keeping them around the edges of the story as ghosts of memory. Later, getting in the way of our attachment to another young character, the show reshapes Bertie’s daughter, Nina (Harper Burns), to be aggressively bratty.
The cast is fine, and Zurin Villanueva, in several small roles, has real presence. The orchestra sounds pleasant, though the music is unmemorable and the lyrics mundane, undermining the notion of Cee Cee’s artistry. The only tune you are likely to find yourself humming post-show is “Wind Beneath My Wings,” Larry J. Henley and Jeff Alan Silbar’s hit from the movie soundtrack.
Incredibly, it is possible in this show to miss Bertie’s offstage death entirely. Blink at the wrong moment, and you will not see the mere nod from the hospice worker to Cee Cee, who instantly shifts, mid-conversation, to speaking of Bertie in the past tense.
Anyway, don’t worry. You won’t feel a thing.
Beaches Through Sept. 6 at the Majestic Theater, Manhattan; beachesthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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