Beaches: Musical review

Beaches review

Review: a friendship musical that refuses to stay in one key

“Beaches” arrives with a built-in cultural shortcut: most people think they already know the ending, the song, the tissue situation. The stage version’s job is to make that familiarity feel earned again, not merely triggered. The retooled 2024 Calgary production, now aimed at Broadway in 2026, mostly understands the assignment. It treats nostalgia as a liability. It races past the postcard version of female friendship and insists on the messier one, where devotion and competitiveness share a dressing room.

What the show gets right is the lyric strategy. Iris Rainer Dart writes in clean emotional language because the plot has decades to cover and too many opportunities to blur. The words keep returning to practical artifacts and actions: letters, calls, doors opening and slamming, the mechanics of “show business” as a lifestyle choice. That clarity makes the best numbers feel like they are advancing story, not pausing it. Intermission’s review noted that the songs “seamlessly” fit the action and called the piece “spine-tingling and tender,” which is basically the production’s target branding, but also a fair description of its best gear shifts.

Mike Stoller’s score is less interested in pastiche than utility. The music changes shape because the characters do. Cee Cee’s world is performance-first, a life built around audiences and exits. Bertie’s world is interior, trained by family expectations, and later, by the shock of choosing herself. The smartest musical moments are the ones that let the women mirror each other, then contradict each other on the next beat. Their duets often play like emotional negotiation, not romantic harmony. That’s the point. This is not a love story that wants to be tidy.

Where it can still wobble is the compression. Critics in Calgary framed it as promising but still in development. BroadwayWorld’s roundup quoted the Calgary Herald calling it “a work in progress” that “could do with a few more rewrites,” even while praising how “slick and classy” it looked and sounded. That tension is useful to name, because it points to the hardest dramaturgical problem: you cannot speed-run 30 years of rupture and repair without occasionally making a scene feel like a highlight reel.

The big question is the one “Beaches” cannot dodge: how to use “Wind Beneath My Wings” without turning the climax into a cover version. Calgary materials place the song at the finale, staged as memory and legacy, not just farewell. If the Broadway version keeps that framing and continues to sharpen the causal chain of the friendship fights, it has a path to something rarer than catharsis: inevitability. You cry not because you recognize the song, but because the story cornered you into it.

What to listen for if you care about lyrics

• Repetition with consequences: “letters,” “best,” “need,” and “said” recur as the friendship matures, then breaks.
• Public versus private language: Cee Cee performs confidence; Bertie speaks in self-edits. Watch how the lyric diction changes when they are alone together.
• The fight songs: the show’s emotional peaks often happen when the characters are verbally unkind, not when they are inspirational.

Critical snapshot (Calgary premiere)

“Spine-tingling and tender.”

Calgary Herald (via roundup): “a work in progress” that “could do with a few more rewrites,” but “slick and classy.”

Beaches Lyrics: Song List

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