“Beaches” at the Majestic Theatre, New York
Glenda Frank in Midtown Manhattan
★★★☆☆
19 May 2026
I was surprised by Beaches which has been adapted into a musical by Iris Rainer Dart who wrote the best-selling novel. Dart collaborated with the late Thom Thomas on the libretto. I have no fondness for the 1988 film with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. With little insight into the characters, the sentimentality didn’t seem earned. The roles were so uneven; it seemed more a tribute to Midler with Hershey’s character as a plot prop.
Photo credit: Marc J Franklin.
This time the co-authors corrected the imbalance by giving Bertie a more assertive personality and strengthened the class conflict between the two best friends. Lonny Price and Matt Cowart (Sunset Boulevard), longtime collaborators, took the impressive cast through an array of emotions. Lately directors have been ferrying fictional women centre stage, out of the shadows of stereotyping, and it’s making their productions fizz. This incarnation of Beaches, although still based on assumptions about friendship, has more teeth and depth.
The 30-year relationship begins in 1951 when Bertie White encounters an annoyed Cee Cee Bloom at the beach. Cee Cee is trying to nap under the boardwalk before a show, and Bertie is trying to escape her controlling mother. They are eleven. Cee Cee decides she likes this interloper and drags her off to watch her performance. The actors are cute and Samantha Schwartz (Broadway debut) knows how to capture an audience with her routine. Young Bertie (Zeya Grace) is gob smacked. She didn’t know girls like Cee Cee existed.
Was I the only one questioning why Bertie went off with this stranger? Was it because her upper class mother would not approve? Because Cee Cee has a vitality that her genteel world lacked? Because she was curious? I kept asking why through out the musical and caught glimpses here and there, especially in the scene where a twenty-something Bertie runs away from her studies to try out life as a hippy.
As girls and as women, Cee Cee and Bertie live in separate worlds but they keep in touch, primarily through letters. Bertie (Kelli Barrett, Parade) is extremely bright, does well in academia and gains easy acceptance to law school. Cee Cee (Jessica Vosk, Wicked) is honing her skills as a performer. She goes through rejection and poverty – the generic story – on her path to stardom. The standout scene is when Bertie joins her friend at a struggling theatre. Cee Cee is paying her dues while Bertie is on vacation, slumming and experimenting with the forbidden: smoking pot, wearing outfits that would horrify her mom’s friends, and enjoying sex. Cee Cee is falling in love with John Perry (the appealing Brent Thiessen in a Broadway debut) , the theatre manager she almost idolizes. She resolves to tell him her feelings, but he’s busy. Bertie is in his room. You’re the sort of woman a man marries, he tells Cee Cee. Bertie is not. What he doesn’t say is that he knows that he’s her summer fling, that she does not see him as marriage material either. Her mother is pushing a marriage to the wealthy but stiff Michael Barron (Ben Jacoby), who Bertie eventually does marry. Eventually John becomes Cee Cee’s husband, then manager.
Photo credit: Marc J Franklin.
Although subtle, Cee Cee’s loneliness is poignant. As a child, she wants someone to see her perform and to admire her costumes. In the scene where John tells her he is leaving, she offers him all she has: money to buy the small theatre he plans to run and her name on the playhouse to draw in customers.
Not until the end of the musical does Bertie acknowledge Cee Cee as an equal. She is dying of cancer. Cee Cee has rushed to her side to nurse her. When Cee Cee asks if she can raise Bertie’s daughter, Bertie is close to horrified. She has chosen (Lael Van Keuren) to rear the child. It’s only just before her death that Bertie recognizes the value of Cee Cee’s vitality and passion which are in short supply in her world. In a farewell letter, she tells Cee Cee that she and her daughter have a lot to learn from each other. You could call that love, but I see it as respect and a clear assessment of the values a child needs to fulfill her potential. I like the hard edge of her decision.
The subtle class distinction is what saves the plot of Beaches although the draw of the story for many is the idealization of friendship. The promotional material plays on this by citing feelings that the movie aroused.
But Beaches is a musical, a genre that often lives in its own fairytale world. As a musical, the songs and performers are a powerful draw. Cee Cee and Bertie’s duet, “The Words I Should Have Said,” “Wind Beneath my Wings,” and “Wish I Could Be Like You” deepen our understanding of these two women struggling to reach across the class divide. The music is by Mike Stoller, the lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart. Stoller has an interesting background. He and his songwriting partner, Jerry Leiber, wrote over 20 songs recorded by Elvis Presley, including “Hound Dog” and “Love Me.” They were also authors of the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown” and “Searchin’.” Smokey Joe’s Café: The Songs of Leiber and Stoller is a seven-time nominee for the Tony Award and the longest running musical revue in Broadway history.
