NEW YORK — “Beaches,” the long-troubled new musical based on the 1988 Garry Marshall tear-jerker starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, has been trying to wash up on Broadway shores for at least a dozen years.
You can see why the project got started. Lifelong female friendships fall in Broadway’s demographic sweet spot, and the story of an outre variety entertainer with a lot in common with Midler herself and her straight-laced but loyal pal easily lends itself to production numbers, and the film was famous for making everyone cry.
Plus, there is an iconic song therein, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” that spent a week at No. 1 atop the Billboard singles chart in 1989 and subsequently secured a place on the playlist of many a fine funeral on both sides of the Atlantic.
On a deeper level, as Marshall well understood, “Beaches” also probed how people’s different trajectories and life choices either stress or confirm friendships. And, in its moving exploration of how a highly successful woman puts her high-profile career on hold just so she can be there for her friend, it gets at a dilemma that many people face at some point in their lives.
I first saw the musical take on “Beaches” in 2015, although that early tryout featured completely different music and lyrics by someone else entirely, as well as different stars (Shoshana Bean and Whitney Bashor). Only the book, penned by Iris Rainer Dart and Thom Thomas, remains and that’s perhaps because Dart was hard to fire, given that she wrote the original novel on which the movie was based. Thomas, sad to recount, died in 2015 while he was working on the original revisions.
The show that opened Wednesday night at the Majestic Theatre features music (aside from you-know-what song) by the 93-year-old Mike Stoller, one-half of the famed songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller. Lonny Price and Matt Cowart share the director’s chair, and Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett are the new stars. As in prior incarnations, the musical closely follows the trajectory of the movie.
In terms of score and book and mostly digitized set design from James Noone, “Beaches” certainly makes no formative or stylistic waves, and the show feels, at times, like everyone involved here just wanted to be finished and done and get out of all of this in one piece, with a tour and licensing to come. The score is serviceable, with a recurring song called “My Best” (as in friend) its best number.
We see three different versions of the two women as kids, teens and adults (Samantha Schwartz is Little Cee Cee and Bailey Ryon the teen version, while Zeya Grace plays Little Bertie and Emma Ogea the teen). There are constant callbacks to the past, even at the top of “Wind Beneath My Wings,” where that only gets in the way. The men in the lives of these women are, of course, mostly written to be stereotypes of inadequacy and that is exactly what Ben Jacoby and Brent Thiessen deliver.
Aside from Noone’s savvy visual evocation of the era of the movie, the best thing about the piece now is Vosk’s leading performance, which is funny, charming, expertly sung and just messy enough to be vulnerable and appealing. Barrett has the harder job, really, and, although I found her overly impenetrable at times (a danger with how this role is written), she also has her moving moments, although she lacks an Act 2 number that really gets at what it’s like to be the best friend of a megastar.
All that said, my eyes were more moist than they were a decade ago, perchance a function of my age and growing sentimentality, but also of a story that just is inherently appealing, especially for anyone who has seen cherished friends drop away.
There is an audience for this sentimental piece, I think, given the relative paucity of sincere musicals this season. Women, especially, who remember and love the movie and its signature song will warm to its proffering of a thing devoutly to be wished: your most successful friend telling you they owe it all to you.
Enough for a nice matinee with a bestie, no?
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
At the Majestic Theatre, 245 W. 44th St., New York; beachesthemusical.com
