Beaches Is On Broadway—And We'll Cry if We Want To

If you’ve got tickets to see Beaches, A New Musical on Broadway, one thing is for sure: You better bring tissues.

The 1988 film is a beloved tale of lifelong friends, two women who are as different as can be, but who find in each other the closest, most intimate, friendship as they see each other through life’s ups and downs. Starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, the cult favorite is a rather infamous tearjerker. If you’re a lady, you likely already know the plot spoiler that most causes this. But, as it turns out, Beaches doesn’t just pull female heartstrings.

“I made my fiancé watch it after I got the role,” says Jessica Vosk, starring as aspiring actor-turned-Broadway star Cee Cee Bloom, the role played onscreen by Midler. “He had never seen it, for he is straight,” she says with a wink (Beaches also has a powerful audience base in the gay community—as does Vosk, a former Elphaba). “By the end, he bawled his eyes out.”

After devastating ladies and gays for decades, Beaches has now been turned into a Broadway musical, with a book by screenwriter Iris Rainer Dart and Thom Thomas, and music by mid-century songwriting icon Mike Stoller. Opening night is April 22 at the Majestic Theatre. 

“We need a good cry because our body needs to process our existential dread that we’re living in all the time,” shares Kelli Barrett, who plays Bertie White (played onscreen by Hershey)—a lawyer who lives her life in a more traditional way than the free-wheeling Cee Cee. Barrett is uniquely well cast for this story because, as someone with a side gig as a life coach and a deep interest in psychology, she’s spent much time contemplating the importance of getting one’s feelings out. “We repress our emotions all the time. We push it down, but our bodies don’t want to do that. We want to be okay with it. And so, we seek these things out, to get that physical process of grief. Catharsis—that’s why we go to the theatre.”

Though Vosk and Barrett played opposite each other in the 2024 world premiere of Beaches at Theatre Calgary in Alberta, Canada, doing the musical on a Broadway stage has demanded a new level of rigor. The challenge, especially, is living that story eight times a week, these leading ladies say—and it can be exhausting. That’s doubly hard when you’re also belting out Beaches’ powerful songs. Don’t worry; though Beaches on stage is mostly its own entity and separate from the film, with an original score. But, you will still get to hear Vosk sing the film’s iconic anthem “Wind Beneath My Wings” at the end. That's especially heady for Vosk, who's been tasked with not only playing a role originated on screen by Midler, who she calls her "number-one" idol since childhood, but also singing one of Midler's most iconic songs.

"She's one of the road pavers, glass-ceiling crushers of a generation," Vosk says of the stage and screen icon, who was most recently in a smash-hit revival of Hello, Dolly! Lucky for Vosk, her lifetime obsession with Midler has proven to be excellent prep work for this musical. "[The character] is so much based on who she was, the downtown, avant garde, gay icon, what-have-you kind of woman." Having played musical theatre's favorite green witch in Wicked, Vosk knows a thing or two about being a gay icon. She says everything she's been able to do with her own career was only possible because Midler did it first. "Her ability to be witty with words, smart with comedy, fast with comedy—she's in everything I do, because I've always been enraptured with Bette Midler."

And, she says, the journey of learning to be able to sing "Wind Beneath My Wings" after performing this story has been transformative. “I’m a perfectionist, certainly about my singing,” Vosk admits. “But there has to be a part of me on this one that is okay with messiness. If I have to choke on that, I choke on that—but you’re seeing something real.”

The process has been similarly intense for Barrett, who (no spoilers here) is the source of the musical's most tear-jerking moment. "The minute I make my last exit, I sob and sob and sob," she says. "Some days it's just a minute, some days it takes five, 10 minutes. But it's a lot of tears, and then I have to fix my face for bows."

But it’s all about the yin and yang of it all. Most of Beaches, Barrett says, is funny and joyful because that’s what makes the ending a gut punch. That also means that to get herself to where she needs to be by the end of the show, she has to remember to soak in all the joy around her in real life.

“I savor things differently,” she explains. “We laugh a lot. And I’m really sitting in my joy with my family, my dog. It makes the show better, because it makes the loss greater. What a gift getting to do a show that reminds you of what living is.”