“Beaches” at the Winter Garden Theatre (Photo: Marc J. Franklin)
The best song in the musical adaptation of Beaches, now on Broadway after a decade-plus in development, comes at the very end of the show. It was also written in 1982. “Wind Beneath My Wings,” a sentimental lament made famous by Bette Midler in the source film, soars like the proverbial eagle above the dreck that surrounds it. Occurring in the show’s last five minutes, it introduces genuine pathos into an endeavor otherwise happy to coast on mawkishness.
It probably matters too that “Wind Beneath My Wings” is the only number not written by Iris Rainer Dart and Mike Stoller, the pair that shepherded this schlockfest into an existence that barely touches mediocrity. For someone who wrote some of the catchiest tunes of the twentieth century, Stoller supplies melodies here that might have been automatically produced by a Casio keyboard. Dart may have written multiple novels, but her lyrics are laughable when they’re audible, which is about thirty percent of the time.
The result makes Dart and Stoller’s previous collaboration, 2011’s largely forgotten The People in the Picture, look Pulitzer-worthy in comparison. If you informed me this was the first musical generated entirely by AI, I’d believe you.
The treatment faithfully replicates its source material, depicting the decades-long friendship between Cee Cee Bloom (Jessica Vosk) and Roberta “Bertie” White (Kelli Barrett). After meeting as children on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, they become pen pals and best friends, advising each other through life’s ups and downs. (Cee Cee and Bertie are played as youngsters by Samantha Schwartz and Zeya Grace, and as teenagers by Bailey Ryon and Emma Ogea.) Cee Cee uses her unique talents to become a glamorous singing sensation, while Bertie, stifled by the expectations of her society upbringing, defers her dream of attending law school for an unhappy marriage.
The material obviously connects with a certain audience and there is much to mine in the dynamics of female friendship: sustained love in the face of disagreement and the inevitable tragedy that proffers the show’s ultimate conclusion. However, Dart’s libretto (written with the late Thom Thomas) defaults often to the path of least resistance. Stereotypes are trotted out about Cee Cee and Bertie’s divergent backgrounds: Jews are funny, but vulgar, WASPs are elegant, but uptight. The jokes are old enough to collect social security.
The show speed-runs through plot points, including the dissolution of Cee Cee’s marriage to a man she loves (Brent Thiessen) and Bertie’s liberating divorce from a man she doesn’t (Ben Jacoby). When Bertie ominously informs Cee Cee that she’s seeing a doctor, you know what’s coming next. Yet for all its abbreviation, the show feels endless and ploddingly paced, and you wonder how it took two directors (Lonny Price and Matt Cowart) to helm something so stagnant and stale.
The staging accentuates the flaws, with a scenic design by James Noone that relies too heavily on wispy video projections (done by David Bengali) that resemble computer screensavers. Nearly every scene ends with a blackout, which highlights the abrupt nature of the writing. (Ken Billington did the lighting design.) Jennifer Rias’s choreography looks as if it could have been recycled from any number of cheesy nightclub acts from the ‘70s or ‘80s — and sequences that blatantly rip off Gypsy by having adult actors seamlessly replacing their child counterparts in the same scene only reinforce the earlier musical’s greatness by comparison.
What Beaches lacks most, though, is star quotient. Vosk possesses a titanic voice, yet it contains none of the originality of sound or panache of delivery you associate with a performer like Midler. In book scenes, she fades into the background where she should come across as an assertive presence. Barrett gives a pleasant, bland performance, betraying no real sense of Bertie’s stifled dreams. A moment that should elicit sobs — when Bertie confesses to Cee Cee near the end of her life that she never truly experienced romantic love — passes for naught.
There were tissues passed and ovations proffered during the curtain call, but the emotional response felt more perfunctory than earned. Beaches may have “Wind Beneath My Wings,” but there’s little wind in its sails. Tell the management at Joe Allen to make space on the flop wall.