Beaches (c) Marc J. Franklin
Broadway: Beaches
At the Majestic Theatre
I will always remember the 1988 film Beaches as the end of a trio of enjoyable Bette Midler female friends-centric films, starting with the comedies Outrageous Fortune with Shelley Long and Big Business with Lily Tomlin. I was a big fan of the first two, and while I certainly enjoyed Beaches, the more serious one with Barbara Hershey, its overly sincere and weepy elements weren’t to my taste. However, they were exactly what made it popular with its fans, and there was certainly no doubt the musical adaptation would embrace them. But having Iris Rainer Dart, the original author of the book the movie based on, as the writer here (with the late Thom Thomas) may have doomed the stage version as the show kept too many extraneous plot points that bog down the emotional bond between two lifelong friends. The flashier and brasher Cee Cee Bloom is played by the talented Jessica Vosk, who is fighting to find her own voice in the role, while the production won’t let the audience forget the Midler of it all. Kelli Barrett has an easier job playing the more sedate and fussy Bertie, and the two leads feel comfortable and lived in together, although they occasionally fall into a more Mary Richards-Rhoda Morgenstern rhythm instead of creating a unique vibe of their own.
Beaches (c) Mark J. Franklin
Cee Cee and Bertie first meet as kids (Samantha Schwartz and Zeya Grace, respectively) on the beach of Atlantic City where Cee Cee is performing her vaudeville act and the more upper crust Bertie can’t find her mother. This one-day meeting is the start of a lifelong friendship that continues through their teen years (Bailey Ryon as Cee Cee and Emma Ogea as Bertie) as pen pals before Bertie, running away from her insufferable mother, joins Cee Cee at a regional theater run by John (Brent Thiessen), as the rare, straight theater guy with six-pack abs. (Note to all new musical writers, it is never wise to bring up a Sondheim property in your own show). From there, the friendship is celebrated and tested throughout the years with equal parts love, jealousy and misunderstanding, mostly courtesy of Bertie’s toxic male husband, Michael (Ben Jacoby). Throughout it all, we don’t get the Midler songs she sings in the film, but a whole new score by Dart and Mike Stoller (of the legendary songwriting duo of Lieber and Stoller), which falls mostly in the easy-going but generic pop song category in the first act, before gaining more dramatic heft in the second. Of course, you can’t have Beaches without its Grammy-winning hit, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and if the group of friends around me weren’t sniffling and holding back tears before that moment, they certainly were during it. My tears refused to be jerked, however, as Lonny Price’s production is concerned less with an emotional throughline of the friendship and more with keeping the many plot balls clear (the fractured timeline approach became confusing when a hospital room scene arrived way too early in the show – turns out it was for someone else). Hoping to capture the same loyal Broadway fan base as the other female friendship musical, Wicked, Beaches never defies the gravity that keeps it earthbound.
Becky Shaw (c) Marc J. Franklin
Broadway: Becky Shaw
2nd Stage at the Helen Hayes Theatre
It’s risky for a playwright to name a play after a fictional character. Following in the tradition of O’Neill’s Anna Christie, Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Shaw’s Candida, audiences at the premiere will not know the genre or even the theme of these plays as opposed to Death of a Salesman or Desire Under the Elms. Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw goes one step further by not having her titled character appear until about 45 minutes into the first act. Until then, the main character seems to be Suzanne Slater (Lauren Patten), admittedly not as melodious a name, a psychology grad student whose father has just died. Her mother, Susan (Linda Emond) denies that he has mismanaged their finances, despite being told so by Max (Alden Ehrenreich), who handled the father’s business finances. In the most hard-to-believe plot device in a play filled with them, the young Max was raised by Susan and her husband after Max’s mother died and his father moved away, in a sort of Wuthering Heights kind of way. Like the Emily Brontë novel, there does seem to be a destructive devotion between Suzanne and Max, especially when Suzanne, a year after her father’s death, swiftly marries Andrew (Patrick Ball), who unlike Max, is full of empathy and heart. It is at this point our title character enters the play: Becky Shaw (Madeline Brewer), a wide-eyed quizzical look painted on her face, is a temp in Andrew’s office, and for some (again hard-to-believe) reason, Suzanne and Andrew set her up on a blind date with Max. Becky, whose initial impression to the audience (and Max) is clueless Stepford wife, has gone through some unique relationship situations in her own life, and how this date with Max sets up a chain of events that gets sillier as it goes along.
Becky Shaw (c) Marc J. Franklin
Yet with all these plot inconsistencies, Becky Shaw is one of the funniest shows on Broadway right now. The play premiered in 2008 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It has smart and snappy dialogue, and in the current Broadway revival, the main beneficiary of the comedy is Ehrenreich, as the down-to-Earth-but-thinks-way-too-highly-of-himself Max, steals the show, hard to do in an ensemble this tight and funny. The actor, who was in the recent Weapons, and most known for his role in Hail, Caeser!, has a delicious acerbic delivery and condescending tone that are so sharp you miss him when he’s not on stage. Even though she has to cede the stage to Ehrenreich whenever they’re together, Patten (Tony Award winner for Jagged Little Pill) does land some great punches of her own. Ball, most recognized for the TV show The Pitt, knows that Andrew is there to be the polar opposite of Max, as the overly sensitive male of the show, and he really digs into it. Brewer has the hardest role as she enters the play as a deer in headlights but then pivots to someone smarter and more manipulative than she first appears. Brewer handles the comedy well, but the character of Becky Shaw, and why she is the titled character eludes me. And, of course, there is the woefully underused Linda Emond, as Susan only appears in the first and last scenes of the play, and despite the short stage time, she is captivating and extremely funny as the purposefully clueless matriarch. A lot of the praise has to go to director Trip Cullman, who has made a small play about a family in crisis into a big Broadway-worthy, not-to-be-missed crowd pleaser.
The Fear of 13 (c) Emilio Madrid
Broadway: The Fear of 13
At the James Earl Jones Theatre
I can see why playwright Lindsey Ferrentino wanted to adapt the 2015 documentary, The Fear of 13, the documentary about death row inmate Nick Yarris, who as a drug-addicted young man was accused of raping and killing a woman in 1981, a charge Yarris emphatically denied. In British director David Sington’s film (which I haven’t seen), the film is a monologue by Yarris with Sington using archival footage or recreation of events Yaris describes. If only Ferrentino kept the one-man narrative format for her play, which after a successful run in London a couple of years ago, is finally arriving on Broadway in a new production directed by David Cromer. Yarris is played by two-time Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody, who was also in the London production, and a lot of the play is his life story before and after incarceration. Brody is an expert at playing ordinary people caught in ordinary circumstances in films like The Pianist and The Brutalist, and he brings an inviting quality to Yarris, who passes the time in his cell reading books and looking up definitions to new words, that creating a bond with the audience before his full story is revealed. His tale has been expanded to include other inmates, lawyers, judges, childhood friends and his parents, most of whom, despite the talented cast, don’t make any real impression, not even the cruel guard (Joel Marsh Garland), who would seem to be the perfect villain of the story, but sort of disappears halfway through. There is a nice diversion of two inmates in love that has a lovely, but heartbreaking finale, played especially well by Ephraim Sykes. But the only real substantial character that Ferrentino creates is that of Jacki, an amalgam of different real-life people, here a volunteer who visits death row inmates to give them some human contact. Even with an engaging and sympathetic performance by the wonderful Tessa Thompson (Hedda, Thor: Ragnarok), who along with Brody is making her Broadway debut, Jacki as a character never comes alive. She is mostly a sounding board for Nick, and she even gives him her phone number for him to call her at home (it seems phone privileges are lax for death row prisoners who are not allowed to even talk to each other).
The Fear of 13 (c) Emilio Madrid
But Jacki does play an important role for the audience as she gets Nick to tell her about the crime and trial that got him on death row. She also decides to help him get his case reevaluated as the new science of DNA testing is more widely available now than in 1981. This section of the play should be full of tense, dramatic moments as the two get some good news but mostly bad news as they encounter red tape after red tape, reaching out to anyone to listen to their plight. Unfortunately, the play mostly treats these moments as blips on the timeline instead of real heartbreak (the woman behind me did “tsk” each time there was a setback). And then in the oddest dramaturgical choice, in the big finale of the play, Nick decides to tell us a harrowing story from his childhood that comes out of nowhere, and I can’t figure out if it’s supposed to illuminate something or just pile on Nick’s hard life with one more horror. Even with all these odd choices, the humanity and miscarriage of justice of Nick Yarris’s story is effective and heartbreaking (I do wonder if these same events would have transpired if he was black), mostly because of Brody, Thompson and the cast. Cromer keeps the play moving whenever he can but does seem to be hindered by the play’s structure. As for the explanation of the title? It never arrives. It turns out that one of the words Nick enjoyed learning the meaning of in the documentary was triskaidekaphobia, the fear of 13, and for that, the documentary and play were named. Why this small tidbit was left out of the play is incredulous to me.
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