‘Beaches’ Made Me Sad — But Not the Way It Wants To

Did we learn nothing from Pretty Woman?

Eight years ago, when producers tried to seduce the Chardonnay drinkers of the tristate area with a Broadway-musical adaptation of a beloved Garry Marshall movie, the results were a study in deadly theater. All the shoulder pads, all the quotable quotes, an extra pump or two of girlboss feminism, and not a pulse to be found in the body — no reason for being, apart from the marketability of comfort.

Of course, that right there is the answer to my question, which ultimately turns on who the “we” is. Although Pretty Woman didn’t recoup on Broadway, its national tour did, and the show still holds the box-office record at the Nederlander. Cozy old IP sells, even though reshaping it for the stage often results in something akin to Weekend at Bernie’s. (Oh God, that’ll be next.)

And so we get Beaches. To be fair, the new musical is an adaptation of Iris Rainer Dart’s book rather than the movie it inspired. But whether one of the protagonists is named Hillary (movie) or Bertie (novel and musical) doesn’t really signify — Bette Midler’s performance as the other heroine (C.C. in the movie, Cee Cee here and in the book) has ensured that the lines between media will forever be blurred. Cee Cee and Bette have long since been fused into a single cultural entity. An actor coming along today isn’t merely rustling up the redheaded showgirl chutzpah of the character Dart wrote; she’s also navigating her way around the Divine Miss M.

The fact that Jessica Vosk is singing her butt off as Cee Cee up on the Majestic stage, and really doing her best underneath an endless succession of red wigs, is therefore both good and, well, not bad but somehow sad. It’s nice to hear great singers sing. It’s sad to hear them pour themselves out in service of something so fundamentally trite — and something that, in Vosk’s case, won’t ever emerge from a shadow no matter how well she lands the punch lines and rattles the rafters. It won’t because it’s not meant to: Bette is supposed to be in the room with us, along with the tissues stuffed in our pockets for “Wind Beneath My Wings.” The familiarity and predictability are so completely the point that 40 years ago Roger Ebert was shaking his head about how a brand-new movie could feel so stale. Beaches, he wrote, “is a movie completely constructed out of other movies — out of clichés and archetypes that were old before most of the cast members were born. It is difficult for a filmgoer of reasonable intelligence to care about characters whose lives are re-enactments of clichés: If these people are as smart as they think, why can’t they see that their lives are a bad B movie?”

Well, now their lives are a bad B movie inside a formulaic musical. The first of those formulae: Frame it in flashback. Cee Cee Bloom, who in this rendering of her story (with lyrics by Dart herself and a book by Dart and Thom Thomas) might as well just be Bette Midler, gets a call in the middle of filming for her smash-hit CBS variety show and hightails it up to Monterey. We’ll get periodic check-ins with her on her way (repeatedly finding out that she’s such an American icon that people will give up their plane tickets and cabbies will venture out in storms to get her where she needs to go), and we too will take our own journey, Anastasia-style, to the past. Years ago, when Cee Cee was a precocious, tough-talking Jersey Shore squirt with a stage mom and a dream, she met another little girl on the Atlantic City beach. The pair, opposites in plenty of ways, became instant best friends. They pen-palled their way through tweendom — which makes for a song full of earnest letter-passing choreography and big projections of cursive — and then re-met in person at a summer-stock theater where their adult lives kicked off in earnest. It’s always been Cee Cee Bloom and Bertie White (Kelli Barrett) and will be until death do them part. Clearly, it’s to Bertie that Cee Cee is running.

Co-directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart against a constantly reassembling background of screens, screens, screens, Beaches is a bit like its fiery-haired heroine: terrified of slowing down. With a run time creeping toward three hours, it’s jammed full of incident (So. Many. Montages.) and apparently determined to scrape the barrel of clichés for tropes the movie left out. There’s an amateur theater diva maundering about Lorca and trauma while strapped into a flight system to play Peter Pan (Sarah Bockel, who also, more enjoyably, plays Cee Cee’s kvelling, kvetching, lamé-addicted mama). There’s an almost-friendship-ending rift over husbands (Brent Thiessen is Cee Cee’s, a cool-guy theater director; Ben Jacoby is Bertie’s, a rich jerk) that feels deeply dated and, in the context of the women’s tell-each-other-everything friendship, just plain weird. (Back in 1988, the movie made it a fight over their careers. Imagine!) There’s a moment when Cee Cee, auditioning for a big-shot New York composer, rewrites his song to bring out the girl power. It’s called “A Real Woman,” and it’s somehow still palpably old-fashioned despite her interventions.

Such is the case with a good deal of the show’s score, which never leaves a trumpet flair or a victorious key change unturned. Mike Stoller — 93 years old and half the team that wrote, among other things, “Hound Dog” and “Yakety Yak” — did the music, and he and Dart seem committed to whipping up all the blare and flash of midcentury behemoths like Gypsy with none of the intellectual or emotional piquancy. While Vosk’s sassier Cee Cee holds her own in the churn, Barrett, also a fine singer but trapped in the straight-and-narrow part (with sadder wigs), gets swept out to sea. Bertie’s fate is supposed to get us into our feelings (Beaches is a top-five weepie if nothing else), but here amidst the empowerment anthems and plot points, it’s hard to make room for even a sniffle. Meanwhile, the characters keep telling each other how smart they are, but they don’t live in a smart world. This is going to make a pedant out of me, but I can’t help it: There’s a running gag at the end of Cee Cee and Bertie’s oft-reprised ode to friendship, “Wish I Could Be Like You,” where the pair, whether kids or adults, always has a hard time finishing the couplet, “Like ice cream goes with pie / It will be you and …” Proper WASP Bertie pauses to brush up her carefree bestie’s grammar (“Wouldn’t it be ‘you and me’?” she schoolmarms), and she’s just wrong. Sorry, Bertie. That shit’s a predicate nominative.

And also, clearly, who cares? But let’s all just dig a little deeper here, folks. Let’s not leave hard-working actors to sell half-baked goods or make them use their chops to muscle life into the lifeless eight times a week. Because along with Vosk, there is a lot of vitality in Beaches, most especially bursting from the four young performers who play childhood and teen versions of Bertie and Cee Cee. Again, more is more, but at least here that more is giving some talented kids the chance to shine. As the teens (along with various other roles), Bailey Ryon and Emma Ogea add spark to the contrivance of that epistolary number (“Show the World Who You Are”), but it’s really Zeya Grace and Samantha Schwartz as the littles who scamper away with big chunks of the show. While the sexed-up Baby June mode in which Dart has fashioned little Cee Cee is sometimes unnerving (“Stick out your titties!” she squeals at a shocked baby Bertie), Schwartz is one hell of a mini-dynamo. I’m both excited and worried for her. There’s so much skill there, and so much joyful effervescence. I hope she can maintain both. And that the future gives her better places to go than Beaches.

Beaches is at the Majestic Theatre.