Broadway review: Beaches be trippin’
3 / 10
Dart’s libretto is equally shabby. Several improvements that were made for the movie have been reversed, most damagingly in the major fight that threatens to end the central friendship forever; it now emerges implausibly from a comment about stemware and relies on the hoary dramatic cliché of someone walking in on a kiss at exactly the wrong moment. (The central relationship has nowhere near the depth of either the film or the original novel.) The score includes a few truly terrible sequences, such as a wedding scene (“Holy holy matrimony / Holy moley matrimony”) and a cringeworthy commiseration duet by Cee Cee and Bertie’s husbands (Brent Thiessen and Ben Jacoby, respectively). But mostly it’s just banal and inconsistent, particularly in Bertie’s material.
