Most people remember Beaches as the aggressively sentimental 1988 movie starring Bette Midler. But it was originally a novel by Iris Rainer Dart, who cowrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical version based on her book, not the film. Whether this was to avoid comparisons with the beloved screen tearjerker or not, the result is stilted and mawkish.

 

Beaches follows the lifelong friendship of extroverted Cee Cee Bloom and introverted Bertie White (Hillary in the movie) from the time they meet cute as kids on an Atlantic City beach until the moment Cee Cee drops her show-biz career to look after Bertie when she falls deathly ill. If the movie relied on Midler’s charisma and Barbara Hershey’s weepiness, the musical doesn’t do enough with its two stars. Jessica Vosk plays Cee Cee to the hilt, but she’s been directed to storm around like Midler, even though in interviews she has said she’s definitely not doing that.  

 

Then there’s Kelli Barrett, one of our most winning and talented musical actresses, who plays Bertie. After making a superb Sherrie in the Off-Broadway musical Rock of Ages, Barrett was bypassed when the show first went to Broadway and then was made into a movie. Since then, she’s been in duds like Getting the Band Back Together and Doctor Zhivago. But Barrett is a trooper, and she makes Bertie a far more complete character than she deserves to be. The performers who play Cee Cee and Bertie as young girls (Samantha Schwartz and Zeya Grace) and teenagers (Bailey Ryon and Emma Ogea) are solid, and the number where all three pairs of friends are together onstage—“Show the World Who You Are”—is the most appealing in the entire show. Otherwise, the co-direction of Lonny Price and Matt Cowart is as uninspired as the lazily minimal sets by James Noone.

 

Beaches could have been a jukebox musical, since the movie was crammed with period-specific pop songs; instead, Dart has written lyrics for a bunch of unmemorable songs to which vet Mike Stoller has supplied routine melodies. The elephant in the theater is the soaring ballad “Wind Beneath My Wings,” which became a Midler concert staple after it went to number one on the charts in 1989. But it’s used here in the most middling (or Midlering) way: after Bertie’s offstage death (poor Barrett doesn’t even get a good dying scene!), it’s the obvious 11 o’clock number—but since it seems so obviously tacked on, it doesn’t have the emotional weight as it should. 

 

Botching its biggest hit is an “oof” moment for a show with more than a few of them. On that score, Beaches ends up out of tune.