Schlocky friendship show arrives during Broadways…
Theater review
BEACHES
2 hours and half-hour, with one intermission. At the Majestic Theatre, 247 W. forty fourth Street.
Pay close consideration to the lyrics of the track “Wind Beneath My Wings.” They’re fairly merciless.
“It must have been cold there in my shadow.” Ouch.
“So I was the one with all the glory; you were the one with all the strength.” That’s a backhanded praise if there ever was one.
Even the title suggests the singer’s subject is, properly, fully invisible.
Bette Midler’s dig-filled hit is from “Beaches,” the 1985 film starring her and Barbara Hershey that’s based on Iris Rainer Dart’s novel. Every incarnation of this cliched story, including the new Broadway musical that ill-advisedly opened Wednesday night time, has been about an imbalanced and often poisonous friendship just as Midler’s chart-topper suggests — even if the 2 ladies at its middle are offered as the quintessential buddies.
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The exhumed show at the Majestic Theatre goes so far as to project snapshots of comfortable viewers members with their besties on a giant screen before Act 2 as if to say: You’re all Cee Cee Bloom and Bertie White.
I dearly hope not. Who’d need to endure three a long time of repetitive fights over unappealing males that trigger years-long freeze-outs? I also pray that the hypothetical musicals about the lives of the oldsters in those intermission pictures embrace a lot better songs than the not-so-easy-listening ones right here by Mike Stoller and Dart, and books containing a single plausible human being.
As it stands, the characters who inhabit “Beaches” are about as alive as the sandy shells boring Bertie so loves to acquire.
Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett star as Cee Cee and Bertie in “Beaches” on Broadway. Marc J. Franklin
This musical has been bobbing around the US and Canada since the Obama Administration, and has finally docked during Broadway’s low tide. So not only is its music somewhat long in the tooth, but the rating with some true clunkers also works very laborious not to enterprise too far from the mushy synth Nineteen Eighties sounds of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” There’s nothing new about it.
Even when Little Cee Cee (Samantha Schwartz) and Little Bertie (Zeya Grace) first meet on the Atlantic City boardwalk manner back in 1958, the generic tunes have no sense of time or place.
Skipping forward 30 years, the machine that frames their weepy story is that grownup Cee Cee (Jessica Vosk) is the superstar host of a TV musical selection show. Not too many of those left during the ‘80s! When she will get an emergency telephone call at rehearsal, the panicked lady bolts out of the studio.
As “Beaches” is a property that will never deliver in new followers at this level, all people in the viewers is aware of precisely where she’s going.
The musical traces the 2 buddies’ historical past from their first assembly in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Marc J. Franklin
The musical then travels back in time — just like co-directors Lonny Price and Matt Cowart’s dated stage does — to the buddies’ first assembly in New Jersey.
Cee Cee is a brassy child performer from the Bronx with a prematurely crude sense of humor, and Bertie is a prim, correct and bookish kind from San Francisco in a genteel robin’s egg blue costume. That a Jewish New Yorker and a West Coast WASP make an unlikely duo is a somewhat quaint place to begin, but there it’s.
“Beaches” zips through their up-and-down-but-mostly-down historical past. But don’t misunderstand me — it still feels infinite.
There’s their pen-pal correspondence during their teen years (Emma Ogea and Bailey Ryon for maybe 90 seconds), the faculty days, the formative summer time at a theater company in Beach Haven, NJ, when Bertie (Kelli Barrett) leaves her fiancé and their eventual rocky marriages.
As they grow, their relationship endures rifts and rocky marriages. Marc J. Franklin
The scenes, principally backed by a postcard image of the ocean, hew nearer to Dart’s novel than the movie. There are no prolonged sequences in Manhattan, for occasion. That’s advantageous, however Dart has also laughably heightened her materials for Broadway, writing what she thinks musical dialogue structurally is somewhat than pursuing something resembling honesty.
That impulse is especially evident during an impossibly petty altercation between Cee Cee and Bertie over the standard of stemware while on trip in Malibu with their husbands. A diss units off an absurd falling of dominoes that only serves to make us hate the lot of ‘em. Yet it provides Dart an act-ending cliffhanger.
Actually, we detest the fellows from the second we lay eyes on them. The characters of John (Brent Thiessen), an egotistical theater director, and Michael (Ben Jacoby), an admonishing stick in the mud, are conceptually terrible. Pure manipulation, we’re meant to dislike them because they villainously get in the best way of Cee Cee and Bertie’s allegedly stunning friendship.
Their dumb duet “God Bless Girlfriends” actually doesn’t improve their Q scores.
John (Brent Thiessen) and Michael (Ben Jacoby) are the ladies’s terrible husbands. Marc J. Franklin
For a musical that’s been squatting in numerous cities for more than 10 years, it’s laborious to imagine that so many crummy songs have caught around all this time. The melodies vary from forgettable to bouncy-house random. And the lyrics are, properly, they’re by a novelist.
A dire quantity depicting the women’ weddings mindbogglingly goes “Holy moly matrimony!” In school, a singing Cee Cee advises Bertie that she “escape from that man like my grandparents escaped from the Tsar!” Both have a tune about the other called “My Best.” Who calls their best pal merely their “best”?
Some solar peeks through the cloudy horizon, though, and that’s the fabulous Vosk as Cee Cee. Visually she’s clearly modeled on Midler with a curly purple wig, but the actress has her own distinctive, hotter comedic persona that makes her lovable against the chances. And she’s bought big pipes, so the unhealthy songs are rendered palatable.
The musical has three different pairs of Cee Cees and Berties.
Barrett will get the lesser of the 2 leads — persnickety, fun-hating, old-world Bertie. Still, timid and undefined, the actress is just too content to let Vosk shine. She always walks a step behind.
At the end of “Beaches,” when Vosk belts the well-known track from the film so sublimely, the viewers momentarily forgets the sandy slog that got here before it.
And then, woken up from that trance at the end of the bows, I heeded the advice of another lyric from “Wind Beneath My Wings”: “Fly! Fly! Fly!”
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