Achi news desk-
Beaches of the Musical is a good cry, and that is nothing.
The latest version of the musical opened at Theater Calgary on Friday night, to a packed house that brought a host of Broadway buzz to southern Alberta in the form of dozens of visitors from New York and Los Angeles eager to check it out, alongside a series of Calgary Politicians including the mayor, several councilors and provincial NDP leadership candidate, Naheed Nenshi, who is known to enjoy a night at the theatre.
Beaches is an adaptation of a popular 1988 film starring Bette Midler, Barbara Hershey and Big Bang Theory Mayim Blalik tells the story of the life-long friendship between the free-spirited actress and singer Cee Cee Bloom and Bertie, an heiress.
As they say in the press materials, and Theater Calgary artistic director Stafford Arima reiterated in a pre-curtain presentation Friday, “It’s a love story about friendship.”
That’s a pretty great and off-the-top log line, when we meet Cee Cee and Bertie as toddlers (brilliantly played, respectively by Addison Wagman and Cecilia Curry) on a beach that could being in Coney Island, you could feel the energy of the audience on edge. blew the roof off the Max Bell theatre.
Wagman’s Cee Cee, dressed somewhat incongruously in burlesque attire, is a Borscht Belt comic hiding inside the body of a wannabe teenage starlet with bottomless show business aspirations, while Curry’s Bertie is a young girl right with a brilliant way of pronouncing each one. a word.
Or, to put it another way, Curry was ‘quixotically’ to me.
Cecilia Curry as Little Bertie and Addison Wagman as Little Cee Cee in Beaches the Musical at Theater Calgary. (Photo: Trudie Lee)
It couldn’t go wrong. Could it?
Well, a funny thing happened to the first act as soon as the girls turn into teenage besties Cee Cee and Bertie (don’t blink, you’ll miss it), and then to the young adult editions (with Jessica Vosk as Cee Cee and Kelli Barrett as Bertie), circa 1966.
Somewhat inexplicably, all the juice drains out of the girls’ friendship for about 40 minutes, as the musical labors through a torturous sketch set around a summer stock theater run by the director hot guy John’s (Brent Thiessen) comedy in which Cee Cee struggles to establish herself as an actress — and, failing that, to seduce good lothario John before he’s blinded by WASP Bertie’s good looks and crisp diction .
The dysfunctional scenes of a summer stock theater company can be funny but Beachesit all feels like a sketch of The Carol Burnett Show that would have been cut from the show back in 1976.
Whatever laughs there are to be mined in it Beaches generally coming either from the salty commentary delivered by Cee Cee, a bohemian free spirit who loves to shock, or from the outrageous malaprops delivered by Bertie, whose overbearing mother Rose (Emily Dallas) determined to marry her off to rich Michael (Nathan Gibb Johnson), whether Bertie loves him or not.
It’s all presented in energetic style by co-directors Lonnie White and Matt Cowart in a theatrical style (by designer James Noone) that could best be described as retro-Broadway – there’s a montage of big tents meant to conjure images of Broadway from the 1960s or Vegas Glory to Cee Cee, while at other times we visit Cee Cee on the set of the fictional CBS weekly variety show in which she stars.
Humanity
It’s a strange way of telling stories in the 21st centuryst century but the old-time-Broadway-with musical plan succeeded Hair spray and there is plenty of nod here towards The Producers and maybe even Gypsy too, in tone and design — and there is humanity to the schmaltzier aspects of Beaches that feels comforting, when viewed through the rearview mirror of the pandemic and the resulting loneliness epidemic.
There’s something to be said for an old-timey, old-school musical with its heart in the right place and Beaches of the Musical aims to be the prescription that fills that emotional hole.
After flailing away at the summer stock scene, Beaches probably getting the big musical boat back in the water. The stakes increase between Bertie and Cee Cee after some betrayals that pull them apart and bring them back together again, and both characters start to grow on you.
Kelli Barrett as Bertie White, Jessica Vosk as Cee Cee Bloom in Beaches the Musical at Theater Calgary. (Photo: Trudie Lee)
Vosk has a wonderful voice and a not too shabby sense of humor and manages to capture the loneliness beneath Cee Cee’s diva exterior.
Bertie Barrett is the WASPY, a rich fish out of water in the 60s and 70s and the writers don’t do her any favors but she has a nice way of hanging in there and defying her mother and her class, she really is the only one. do any real rebellion here.
Other notables include John Thiessen, who exudes an easy charm, Alba Evora Weiler as Bertie’s daughter Nina, Sierra Holder, in a variety of roles and Calgary’s Jamie Konchak, as Rose Bloom, Cee Cee’s wild woman mother, and roles others.
It all feels as if someone has dug deep into a log full of archetypes from five or six decades ago, so how much are you willing to go along with 21st century Beaches is up to you.
But plenty of people did on Friday night, where there were plenty of tears and sniffles, so surely a critic can own it when a musical film adaptation manages to turn on the tapes of 700 or 800 theatergoers – even if it feels like it’s sticking. The Wind Beneath My Wings at the end feeling more like a curtain call than a climax.
Ninety-one-year-old legend Mike Stoller wrote a couple of tunes you might be familiar with – Dog Hound, Stand By Me, Jailhouse Rock – composing the music, which had some moments, in tunes like Wish I Can Be Like Youa God Bless Loverswhich elevated the storytelling and beautifully captured the friendship between two unlikely best friends.
The book, by Beaches author Iris Rainer Dart, and playwright Thom Thomas, feel undercooked and coarse – but so are The Producers and won 12 Tonys, so who’s to say? Musicals have their own love language, which usually involves singing your feelings so don’t give in to your disbelief and grumble.
And while the book may not exactly nourish your ears, Rainer Dart has a real talent with words, especially when young Bertie Curry is enunciating them carefully.
Calgary’s Theatre Beaches of the Musical is the latest out-of-town bid for a show that’s been headed for Broadway for a while now – and who knows where it goes from here? Hadestown a Six – The Musical went from Edmonton’s Citadel Theater to long, profitable runs on Broadway.
It can Beaches of the Musical that the next Alberta export to Broadway? Judging by the rents they pay, I’d say all New York theater audiences could use a good cry too.
