‘Beaches, A New Musical’ review: Schlocky friendship show docks during Broadway’s low tide

Pay close attention to the lyrics of the song “Wind Beneath My Wings.” They’re pretty cruel.

“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 compliment if there ever was one.

Even the title suggests the singer’s subject is, well, completely invisible.

Bette Midler’s dig-filled hit is from “Beaches,” the 1985 movie 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, has been about an imbalanced and often toxic friendship just as Midler’s chart-topper suggests — even if the two women at its center are sold as the quintessential pals.

The exhumed show at the Majestic Theatre goes so far as to project snapshots of happy audience 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 want to endure three decades of repetitive fights over unappealing men that cause years-long freeze-outs? I also pray that the hypothetical musicals about the lives of the folks in those intermission photographs include much better songs than the not-so-easy-listening ones here by Mike Stoller and Dart, and books containing a single believable human being.

As it stands, the characters who inhabit “Beaches” are about as alive as the sandy shells boring Bertie so loves to collect.

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 rather long in the tooth, but the score with some true clunkers also works very hard not to venture too far from the soft synth 1980s 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 way back in 1958, the generic tunes have no sense of time or place. 

Skipping ahead 30 years, the device that frames their weepy story is that adult Cee Cee (Jessica Vosk) is the celebrity host of a TV musical variety show. Not too many of those left during the ‘80s! When she gets an emergency phone call at rehearsal, the panicked woman bolts out of the studio. 

As “Beaches” is a property that will never bring in new fans at this point, everybody in the audience knows exactly where she’s going.

The musical then travels back in time — just like co-directors Lonny Price and Matt Cowart’s dated stage does — to the friends’ first meeting in New Jersey.

Cee Cee is a brassy kid performer from the Bronx with a prematurely crude sense of humor, and Bertie is a prim, proper and bookish type from San Francisco in a genteel robin’s egg blue dress. That a Jewish New Yorker and a West Coast WASP make an unlikely duo is a rather quaint starting point, but there it is.

“Beaches” zips through their up-and-down-but-mostly-down history. But don’t misunderstand me — it still feels endless. 

There’s their pen-pal correspondence during their teen years (Emma Ogea and Bailey Ryon for perhaps 90 seconds), the college days, the formative summer at a theater company in Beach Haven, NJ, when Bertie (Kelli Barrett) leaves her fiancé and their eventual rocky marriages. 

The scenes, mostly backed by a postcard image of the ocean, hew closer to Dart’s novel than the film. There are no extended sequences in Manhattan, for instance. That’s fine, however Dart has also laughably heightened her material for Broadway, writing what she thinks musical dialogue structurally is rather than pursuing anything resembling honesty. 

That impulse is particularly glaring during an impossibly petty altercation between Cee Cee and Bertie over the quality of stemware while on vacation in Malibu with their husbands. A diss sets off an absurd falling of dominoes that only serves to make us hate the lot of ‘em. Yet it gives Dart an act-ending cliffhanger.    

Actually, we loathe the guys 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 awful. Pure manipulation, we’re meant to dislike them because they villainously get in the way of Cee Cee and Bertie’s allegedly beautiful friendship. 

Their dumb duet “God Bless Girlfriends” certainly does not improve their Q scores.

For a musical that’s been squatting in various cities for more than 10 years, it’s hard to believe that so many crummy songs have stuck around all this time. The melodies range from forgettable to bouncy-house random. And the lyrics are, well, they’re by a novelist.

A dire number depicting the ladies’ weddings mindbogglingly goes “Holy moly matrimony!” In college, 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 friend simply their “best”?

Some sun 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 red wig, but the actress has her own unique, warmer comedic persona that makes her lovable against the odds. And she’s got big pipes, so the bad songs are rendered palatable. 

Barrett gets the lesser of the two leads — persnickety, fun-hating, old-world Bertie. Still, timid and undefined, the actress is too content to let Vosk shine. She always walks a step behind.

At the end of “Beaches,” when Vosk belts the famous song from the movie so sublimely, the audience momentarily forgets the sandy slog that came 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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