BEACHES

Review by Celia Ipiotis

Friendship, the stuff of unimaginable loyalties and betrayals, figures prominently in Beaches. Originally a popular novel by Rainer Dart. it became a blockbuster film adapted by Mary Agnes Donoghue and starring Bette Midler. Now, a Broadway musical at the Majestic Theater, Beaches is written by Dart and Thom Thomas with a musical score by Mike Stoller and directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart. 

Zeya Grace (Bertie) and Samantha Schwartz (Cee Cee) meet on the beach.

Cee Cee Bloom (Jessica Vosk)  and Bertie Whitney (Kelli Barrett) meet playing in the sand on the beach in Atlantic City. The diametrically different young girls cement a friendship in the early 1950’s that lasts a lifetime.

Overprotected and naive, Bertie is a straight-ahead traditionalist,  while the brash Cee Cee, a child performer,  immediately envisions her life as a star. Studious and prim — in an upper-class lady-like way — Bertie is clueless about sex and life’s options until Cee Cee reveals a grand world of pleasure and opportunity.

After high school, Bertie heads for college to study law while Cee Cee unremittingly races from audition to audition before achieving any level of recognition. A powerful singer and performer, Cee Cee sounds like a mix between Bette Midler and Barabara Streisand. But her uncompromisingly larger-than-life performance commandeers the show causing the rest of the cast to simply float around her.

Drifting from one decade to another, the girlfriends pass through stages of personal exploration, marriage, success and loss. Not surprisingly, Cee Cee becomes a star with the devoted assistance of her husband John (Brent Thiessen) who puts aside his own work to support her career and ego.

Rather than connecting with a soul-mate, Bertie follows the predictable path outlined by her mother and marries an insufferable, ambitious businessman, Michael (Ben Jacoby). When the two couples get together at Bertie’s Carmel house, the chemistry becomes corrosive, erupting in an unbearable five year split between Cee Cee and Bertie.

When the show opens, Cee Cee abruptly deserts a live television broadcast after getting shocking news about Bertie.  Estranged for five years from her friend, Cee Cee does not hesitate to abandon her audience and race to the side of her terminally ill friend in Carmel.  Cee Cee hurdles into the master caretaking position until the inevitable end.

A talented cast, the production’s uneven rhythm feels perfunctory and dilutes emotional arteries feeding the drama. However, many in the audience wept at the end, and left satisfied because as one woman put it to another while filing out of the theater “I’m so happy we came. I feel like I was reunited with a dear friend.”

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis

Photos by: Mark Franklin