“Beaches,” a long-in-the-works stage musical about a decades-long friendship between two women, announced on Tuesday that it would close on Sunday after a disappointingly short Broadway run.
The musical, which opened on April 22 and had been scheduled to run through Sept. 6, is based on Iris Rainer Dart’s 1985 novel. But the material is best known via a 1988 film adaptation that starred Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey and featured a Grammy-winning song, “Wind Beneath My Wings.”
The early closing reinforces the idea that this is the weakest season for new Broadway musicals in years. Just six opened this season, compared with 14 last season, and “The Queen of Versailles” has already closed. It is not clear whether any of the four new musicals that are still running — “The Lost Boys,” “Titaníque,” “Schmigadoon!” and “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” — will become profitable.
“Beaches” was rushed to Broadway with a modest cast of 12, a barely there set and a plan to run just 24 weeks and then go out on tour.
That was a change in plans for the show: The producing team, led by Jennifer Maloney-Prezioso, had announced last year “a pre-Broadway national tour,” but when the Shubert Organization offered the show a vacant theater during an anemic season for new musicals, the producers seized the opportunity. They theorized that the sparsity of new shows would be an advantage and that the Broadway imprimatur would lift the title’s fortunes around the country.
The strategy proved to be an unsuccessful gambit, losing investors millions of dollars (the capitalization cost has not yet been disclosed). The show began previews March 27 and opened April 22 at the Majestic Theater; reviews were mostly negative. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes said the show seemed “like a corner-cutting rush job” and that the result was “a pervasive, underwhelming blandness in a condescending production.”
Tony nominators were apparently underwhelmed as well: The show did not pick up a single nomination.
Sales have been soft from the start. During the week that ended May 10, 49 percent of seats at “Beaches” were unsold, and the average ticket price, $72, was 40 percent below the industry average.
The announcement of the Broadway closing said that “Beaches” planned to begin touring nationally in 2027 but did not provide specific dates or cities.
“Beaches,” about two very different women who meet at the seashore as children and maintain a close but occasionally fraught friendship until one of them tragically dies, was first staged in 2014 at Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., and then in 2015 at Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. The creative team was overhauled, the show was reworked, and another production was staged in 2024 at Theater Calgary in Canada.
The Broadway production, starring Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett, is directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart, and Mike Stoller (who once wrote for Elvis Presley) wrote the music. Dart did the lyrics, and she and Thom Thomas (who died in 2015) wrote the book.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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