How the Creators of BEACHES Musical Are Honoring the Legacy of the Novel and Film

The beloved story of Beaches is heading to Broadway, bringing Iris Rainer Dart’s decades-spanning tale of friendship to the musical stage. In an interview with BroadwayWorld, Dart, who wrote the book and lyrics for the musical, joins composer Mike Stoller and orchestrator Charlie Rosen to discuss adapting the iconic novel and film into a theatrical experience. The trio reflects on the process of honoring the story’s cultural legacy while creating a new musical language for the stage. They also reveal how the show’s songs track the evolving friendship between its two central characters—and why audiences should be ready to laugh, cry, and call their Best Friend afterward. Read the full interview here!

Beaches began as your novel, Iris, then it became an iconic film, and it is now coming to Broadway. Iris, what has it been like to revisit this story across decades?

Iris: I look back over the years and years of my friends, and my relationships with them, and the way that they sometimes carried me across this life. And that doesn’t go away. I was just sitting in a rehearsal and crying again because it’s so touching to think about the friends that are there for us. And so, that’s what it’s like for me, I haven’t stopped crying. The novel came out 40 years ago, I was pregnant with my 40 year-old daughter. It’s been a long, long road, and I never get tired of it.

Well, we never get tired of it either! Charlie and Mike, how has it been for you exploring new themes in the stage version that maybe couldn’t, or haven’t been, explored in other versions?

Mike: Iris asked me to do this a long time ago and at which time I wasn’t ready to deal with that relationship between the two young ladies. But I have read the book, I have read the script, I have cried, but more recently, she asked me to write the songs with her for the show, and I love doing it. It’s a kind of period piece. It’s an old-fashioned musical in many ways. Not that there are not new things in it. But, I love it. And I have enjoyed tremendously working with Iris, and of course, the arrangements are gorgeous! Charlie has, I think, put it in the exact right period, and done it gorgeously.

Charlie: I have two things to add onto that. One is, I think the thing that charms me the most, specifically about the production of the show, speaking more about the music, and working with Mike’s songs—as somebody who grew up appreciating orchestration, and song, and function, and form of this golden age of musical theatre—is they really are songs that carry the function of the show so well. And it makes my job so easy because it’s so obvious when the songs are written well, and they have great raw materials for me to work with, like good hooks, good melodies that feel motivated by character.

It makes it easier for me, as another generation of appreciators of this style of musical, to be able to give it the treatment it deserves in terms of the musical vocabulary of the era, while bringing in some more modern sensibility of things we’ve learned along the way, in the way that we can make it even more exciting for a modern audience while still honoring the vocabulary of orchestrators and arrangers from that era. The musical goes through many decades of time, so being able to navigate that and bring an excitement to those genres that give it a deeper, modern feel—not to say that the music sounds modern—but in a more exciting and modern way, has been really thrilling.

I think what I really love in the global picture of making this material, book and movie, into a musical, is that if you dramaturgically subscribe to the motivation of why things are sung in musicals, it’s because the characters are so full of emotion they cannot possibly continue with the scene unless you heighten it through singing. They can't speak anymore, they must express vocally. And that, I think, is most successful when a show is dealing with themes that are intrinsically emotional, when human beings have a tendency societally to not be able to speak their true feelings. So they must sing.

So, one of those things to me is friendship, long-term friendship. You go through a lot within a long-term friendship. To be able to have things that are difficult to say, sung, it feels like a lot of times when you’re adapting things into musicals, you ask yourself, ‘Can it be sung?’ And for me it comes down to, are the themes in the show deep enough, and human enough that the only way for us to express the profundity of that moment is to sing? and I think that’s what makes this successful.

Mike: That’s what I meant to say!

Iris: Me too!

Iris and Mike, you previously collaborated on The People in the Picture. What drew you to reunite for Beaches, and Charlie, how has it felt to jump in and work alongside them?

Mike: It’s been great. Yes, Iris and I worked together with another friend, Artie Butler, on a show about 10 years ago or so.

Iris: 15 years ago!

Mike: All I can say about Charlie, when we were doing a reading in New York, as I left the hotel where we were staying, I came out and there was a show playing nearby, Some Like It Hot. I walked in since I had the afternoon off, and I heard those arrangements and I said, 'Oh, wow! This is the guy who should do our show'

Iris: How lucky for us! Yes, Mike and I worked on that show with Artie Butler, and I remember at one point Artie said to me one day, “You will never, for the rest of your life, do another project that doesn’t have music in it.” And I said, “Why do you say that?” And he said, “Cause we have to scrape you off the ceiling after every meeting, because you love it so much!” And it’s true, and I haven’t since then. This project, another project I’m working on, they’re all about the music! So, lucky me! What’s so interesting, I’m a word person, I’m now working with these two incredible music people, I cannot read a note on the page, but thank God, I don’t have to!

Mike: You can hear them!

Iris: I can hear them, and that’s good enough for me, because it’s so wonderful. I remember, we did the show in Calgary, hearing Charlie’s orchestrations, they had to scrape me off the ceiling. Charlie, that’s just how it goes!

Mike: And that was a 10-piece band. We’ve got an 18-piece orchestra!

Charlie: Seven horns! This sadly is rare on Broadway these days, but we have an actual live harp player. I feel like so fast people are like, “Oh, we’ll just put the harp on a keyboard,” but Lonny [Price, director] actually specifically was like, “We have to have live harp.”

Beaches is so strongly associated with the film soundtrack. How did you approach finding a musical language for the stage that honors the story’s legacy while still creating something new for a new format?
 

Iris: One thing I would say, aside from what Charlie said, which is brilliant, is when the emotion gets too high they have to sing. But also it happens to be a story about a woman who’s a singer. So that was very helpful to us, because we get to see her doing numbers in her show. And then the rest is when the emotion overflows for her, and for her friend. And the two girls, by the way, Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett, they’re both phenomenal. They’re so right for the parts, and even in real life I feel like they are the parts, in many ways. So, that’s been a stunning piece of luck for us to be able to get the two of them.

Mike: They’re fabulous! As a composer, there is a strange thing that happens in this show because of the tremendous success of the film, and that is that the one song from the film is in this show. And the downside is, as a composer, “My gosh, why does somebody else have a song in here?” But the upside is, people, when you mention Beaches, they say, “Oh, that song!” So that song is in there. It’s going to bring a lot of people to the show, and they’re going to hear the other songs too [laughs].

The central friendship of these two women spans decades, locations, and emotional highs and lows. How did the three of you work together to chart that relationship musically and dramatically across time?

Charlie: Bertie, the journey of her character in the show, she starts out as being very tightly controlled by her mother, very straight and narrow, having to follow society’s prescribed rules. This friendship and the experiences associated with it open her up a little bit experientially. And so, what that means is the music, while still functioning within the time period, goes from some of the buttoned up genres of the era to then, there’s a number where she’s talking about “I finally feel like myself” and it still is rooted in the time period that they’re in, but it’s maybe a little bit more of the swingin’ version of that era. That moment is very interesting because her first song that you hear her sing is this very traditional sounding waltz, and then that moment where she’s opening up is still a waltz, but it’s a jazz waltz!

The songs very deftly also track, within the framework of the eras, the subgenres of those eras, to track the development of these characters. And CeCe’s music, which is diegetic, the songs she sings in character as a performer, they’re pop hits, they track the genres. But then the songs she sings as more nondiegetic musical theatre, 'express my thoughts,' start out kind of the opposite. They’re more carefree like, ‘I’m crazy and I’m a performer, wow this is so fun and wild!’ and as shit gets real, her music actually gets a little more serious, and somber, and emotional as she realizes the depths of the situations that she’s in with her friend and her friend’s daughter. They have this interesting crossover and parallel as the journey goes on, orchestrationally.  

Iris, this story of these two women, it has touched so many people for decades now. Did you expect this when this first got released into the world as a book? Were you at all prepared for the impact that it was going to continue to have on people?

Iris: Over the years, two women will walk up to me if we’re someplace, and someone has introduced me, and they’ll say, “She’s my ‘Beaches’!” Not "She’s my friend,” “She’s my Beaches!” The other thing that always makes me laugh, my daughter, who is now 40, when she was in nursery school, around the time the movie was released, she came up to me one day and said, “Mommy, why do all the other mommies come up to you and say, “I cried!” And then I’d have to say, “Well, Mommy made a book that was made into a movie that makes a lot of people cry!” [laughs]. She’d do her imitation of the moms.

Mike: In addition to crying, which I think everybody who comes to the theatre will cry, they’ll need Kleenex, but you’ll also laugh, because it is so funny! You’ll go through all your emotions.

Iris: Again, these actresses are so wonderful, they’ll make you cry, but they’re hilarious. Jessica Vosk has the timing of Carol Burnett. And Kelli too! Kelli, in many scenes, just gives it right back to her. It’s hilarious, they’re so great together. They’re my ‘Beaches!'

When audiences leave the theater, what do you most hope that they carry with them?

Iris: Jennifer Maloney-Prezioso, our fabulous producer, told me that in Calgary after the show, people would come out and say, “I’m going home and I’m calling my Best Friend.” If they weren’t with that Best Friend, they were calling somebody to tell them they loved them.

Mike: I hope they’ll maybe remember some of the songs! [laughs].

Beaches will open at the Majestic Theatre on April 22, 2026.