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[00:17] We have a great dramatic finish. Oh, I'm sure you do, but Mr. Grant said... Ah, hit it! Hello, all you theater lovers, both out and proud and on the DL, and welcome back to Broadway Breakdown, a podcast discussing the history and legacy of American theater's most exclusive address, Broadway. I am your host, Matt Koplik, the least famous and most opinionated of all the Broadway podcast hosts, and we've got yet another review episode today. It's a double whammy today. We are covering Beaches, the Broadway musical, as well as the revival of Noël Coward's Fallen Angels at Roundabout. I know that it's listed in the title as Beaches and Fallen Angels. I'm going to reverse it and we're going to review Fallen Angels first and then get to Beaches, mostly because I have more to say about Beaches, and so I would like to dedicate the majority of the episode to the second half, and also because it's my own goddamn podcast, and if I want to edge you a little bit, then I'm going to do that. That's what Uncle Matt is going to do. Let's be real, I'm more like a step aunt than anything else. But before we get to either of these reviews for myself, why don't we get to an actual review for myself? This is on Apple Podcasts, a new review we got. So please cue the light of the piazza Overture for Stevie Sondheim's number one. Five stars, best of the best. This has become my number one favorite podcast. Matt and his guests have such great insight and their love and passion for the craft makes listening an absolute pleasure. Keep up the great work, Matt Koplik. Dot, dot, dot, usual spelling. Thank you very much, that's very kind of you. I don't know what guests you think I have and I know they're shit because every guest I've had so far has been a flop. Rob W. Schneider, forget him. Gunkel Adam Ellsbury, flop. Now I love both of those gay men. Thank you, Stevie, that was wonderful. So let's move on. Get things off and running, especially because I got to eventually head out of here to see another double whammy, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Proof. Yeah, it's a big week we have coming up. So Fallen Angels by Noël Coward. This is the first production of Fallen Angels is head on Broadway in, I believe, over 70 years. There was a TV film version with Joan Collins that was much truncated. This version has also been slightly adapted. It's gone from a two act play to a one act play. It's had some extra material, I believe, by Claudia Sheer. Yes. I'll double check. Yeah, there's some additional material by Claudia Sheer in it, who's streamlined it out of a couple of jokes here and there. I assume punched it up a little bit. The basic premise of Fallen Angels, it's very coward in this way. It takes place in the 1920s in London. It's about two longtime friends, Julia and Jane, who are both longtime married. Julia to Fred. Julia is played by Kelli O'Hara. She's married to Fred, played by Asif Mandvi, who some of you may remember, I know I remember from the TV show Younger. Jane, played by Rose Byrne, is married to Willie Banbury, played by Christopher Sterling. There is a running joke that Julia and Fred now have a new mate named Saunders, played by Tracy Cimo. Saunders is extraordinarily competent. She has worked for plenty of famous people whose names she's constantly dropping. She's lived a million different lives. She's worked with the Peace Corps. She's traveled abroad. She knows fluent French. She can play piano forte. She's just extraordinarily accomplished. The list of things that she can do just keeps growing and growing as the evening goes on. But the catalyst for the story of this is that Julia and Jane, before they were married and they are now currently in a state with their marriages where they're very happy with their husbands, but they're not necessarily in love with them anymore. That spark is gone, even though they are very content and they're very refined, well-to-do ladies of very fashionable London. But they both had married, Elizabeth, they both had had a brief but very hot affairs with a Frenchman named Maurice before they were married and at different times. I believe for Julia, they met in Pisa and for Jane, I think they met in Venice or Florence. At the time, he didn't speak a lick of English, which made him even more enticing to them. They both had these very short but very passionate affairs with him. Wouldn't you know it, they haven't seen Maurice in years, but Maurice has written to Julia to inform her that he is in town, and he would very much like to see her, and also would very much like to see Jane. Fred and Willie, their husbands, are off for the weekend to play golf, they're having a little golfing trip. Julia and Jane are all in a tizzy. At first, they are figuring out exactly how they're going to respond to Maurice's request to see them. Do they tell him that they're married? Do they tell him, no, you just can't come over? Or do they flee London? Jane, the more kind of flighty of the two, and I would say the more hysterical of the two, opts for fleeing. And Julia is a little more like, no, no, no, let's simply write to him and tell him that we're both married and that we cannot see him. But of course, before they can do that, they think that Maurice has actually shown up. He hasn't, but that hasn't stopped them from delaying fleeing their apartment or delaying writing to him and telling him that they are married. Instead, Jane, who lives two floors above Julia, there is an empty apartment in between them in their building. Jane and Julia instead decide that they're going to see Maurice at Julia's apartment. They're going to treat him to a very fine dinner. They are going to reminisce about the old times, and that's all that's going to happen. They are not going to fight over him. They are friends. No matter how badly they act, they remind each other, we are friends, and we will always be there for each other. But of course, things get a little sloppy. They get way too drunk on champagne. They start barbing at each other. There is, in a comedy manner style, the next day the husbands end up coming back early. Julia thinks that Jane has gone off with Maurice. Jane thinks that Julia has gone off with Maurice. Neither has. It's all fine. And they explain to the husbands that it was all a big misunderstanding and a joke, only for Maurice, played by Mark Consuelos, to show up. And they finally tell him, oh, we're married. And he says, okay, I understand. By the way, I bought the apartment that's in between yours. Would you mind coming up and seeing it to give me some decorating tips? And they say, sure. And they go up and the curtain comes down as the husbands hear thumping from upstairs. So, you know. Yeah. Two shows we're covering today, both about female friendship. One ends with cancer and one ends with a threesome. Can you guess which one is which? Ba-dum-bum, ba-dum-bum. Actually, I'm not sure if it is cancer on beaches. They never specify. It's just illness. One ends with illness. So that's the whole plot of Fallen Angels in a nutshell. Sorry to spoil for anybody who wanted spoiler-free review. The bottom line of this is, as you can hear from the plot, not a ton happens. Fallen Angels itself is sort of a nothing of a play. It's early Noël Coward. He definitely has wit and he has an ear for the satire of the upper class and a finger on the pulse of audiences' love of 1920s decadence. And sort of sophistication. But he really kind of comes into his own in plays like Private Lives and Blithe Spirit, where there are actual, it's hard to say nuance. I don't feel like there's a lot of nuance in Blithe Spirit, but there's a little bit more of tension and beginning, middle and end in these plays. And there are consequences and things. And the comedy doesn't just come from the mania of the actors or from the wit of the dialogue. There's also plot contrivances that the audiences are invested in. There's not a lot of plot in Fallen Angels. It's very much what I call like a sweet little nothing of a play. It's not bad. It's not great. It's sort of like really nice empty calories. This production doesn't necessarily bolster its reputation, but it does, I think, provide it with enough positives to make it a worthwhile day at the theater. First of all, it does look gorgeous. The production design is stunning. It is, of course, like an art deco apartment as designed by David Rockwell. He has an eye for homes, I would say. Jeff Mashi, I think is his name. Is that how you say it? Yeah, Jeff Mashi. He did the costume design. Costumes are very lovely. There's also wonderful wig design. Ellis hasn't really given the production enough of a zippy pace for my liking. For a show that's as short and as light as this is, it could stand to have a bit more of a tight comedic eye from a direction point of view. Really, the whole production relies on the talents of Kelli O'Hara and Rose Byrne to fly rather than fall our dear angels. Because Rose Byrne and Kelli O'Hara are actually rather fantastic in this, that is the ultimate reason why this is decently worth seeing. It's not an overly hilarious evening of the theater, I would say. This is not Noises Off level. This is not even Private Lives level. It's very exceedingly pleasant, is the best way I would describe it. And really, again, an opportunity for us to watch Kelli O'Hara get sloppy. This is definitely the funniest I've ever seen her be. And thanks to her very grounded and messy work in Days of Wine and Roses, she has warmed herself up for something like Fallen Angels, where she has to actually get silly and messy. Which is wonderful, because for a long time I have found honestly post-South Pacific, Kelli to be a very subtle, but also slightly cold presence, which works for things in like the King and I, but not for maybe to play Amanda in private lives. But for something like Fallen Angels, where the whole joke is, you watch her and Rose Byrne sort of slowly and then quickly fall to pieces, you need that game attitude, which luckily Kelli does have. Rose also is extraordinarily game and allows herself to be the butt of a lot of physical and visual jokes. There's a great deal of wig designed by David Bryan Brown and Victoria Tinsman. Specifically, there's a great reveal of the morning after their drunken escapade, where Rose Byrne comes out in a wig that would put the bride of Frankenstein to shame, I would say. And their chemistry off of each other is really phenomenal. Their, again, their willingness to kind of just make the absolute biggest fools of themselves is really refreshing. It's wonderful. It's both wonderful and frustrating when really beautiful, talented women allow themselves to get ugly, and not in a Charlize Theron in monster kind of way, in a like, we're going to do a bridesmaids, we're like shit in the sink. People forget, I think, often how funny Rose Byrne is, not just in bridesmaids, but if you've ever seen the movie Spy, which is another Melissa McCarthy movie, Rose Byrne is so, so, so good in that movie and actually gives you a good indication of what kind of performance she's giving in Fallen Angels. Everyone else in the show mostly does a solid job. Tracy Chimo is very fun, very quick, very light. There's a lot of talk about her kind of being a scene stealer, which I don't really agree with. She's such a good actress and so versatile, and I love that she's doing a Noël Coward comedy after having done like the Heidi Chronicles and Bad Jus and things like that. But the part is ultimately a one joke machine. It just like it's the same joke over and over and over again. And she finds different facets to it, but ultimately she does not get the same opportunities that Byrne and O'Hara do to really kind of flex a whole bunch of different muscles. Same thing goes for Fitzgerald and for Monvy. They exist purely to be just the men of the show. They are there to have O'Hara and Byrne bounce off of them and do what they do, which is kind of luxury casting. Monvy is a really good actor in Fitzgerald, I think is a comedic genius and has been criminally underused post-COVID. So it's always nice to see them on stage, but they exist purely to be there for O'Hara and Byrne to do their whole bits off of. Last and least is Mark Consuelos as Maurice, who does not look or sound the least bit French, which is, you know, I suppose the point. He's just, you know, he looks like a very handsome lover. He is just as handsome on stage as he is on camera, which tends to be the case for a lot of very handsome people. And the part is nothing. He comes in exclusively to be handsome and to make O'Hara and Byrne swoon. He's there for the last six minutes of the show. It's very much a princess track. And the whole thing just adds up to a, as I said, exceedingly pleasant, I wouldn't say incredibly memorable. The best part of the show is the middle, when Byrne and O'Hara are waiting for Consuelos to show up. And they keep getting interupted by Chimo serving different courses in their meal. They get interrupted by the telephone. Every time it rings, they think it's him, and they run to the telephone, and there's a great bit where every time they go to answer the phone, Rose Byrne wants to answer, but I know Kelli O'Hara just keeps shouting, it's my house, my house, my house, my house. And they become little school girls. And then first, you know, 16, 17, and then eventually as the time continues, they become like five-year-olds. And they really do impeccable drunk work, impeccable comedy work. As I said, it feels like the whole production exists solely for them to have fun. And to have fun, they do. And we have fun watching them. I wish that Coward had inserted a bit more dramatic stakes in the story, not in the sense that I want there to be any kind of morality to it or any kind of consequences, but just something so I'm not waiting for the next bon moment of a one-liner. I'm actually waiting to see what happens next in the story or to see how the rising of stakes allows for more physical comedy. That's what makes the brilliance of the second act of Noises Off. But that's where we're at with this. In terms of Tony chances, I do think costume design, set design are absolute locks for nominations. At this point, while I still have proof to see based off of reviews for proof, I would say that Rose Byrne and Kelli O'Hara are probably locks now for actress in the play. Mostly because if I had to pick one that I preferred, like if you're to say Matt, only one can get nominated, which one is it going to be? I would say Byrne. But that's also more because I think the production has a bit more fun on her than they do on Kelli, who does just as equally good work. But I'm thinking about sort of how a nominator might feel, what their takeaway would be. But also somewhat like how I feel like Megan and Jen both got in for Death Becomes, or how Kristine Ebersole and Patti LuPone both got in for Warpaint. I don't see how you nominate one without the other. The production is successful enough because they're both so good. So I would say right now that they are final two Actress in a Play nominees after Leslie Manville, who I still think is the front runner in this category, Carrie Coon, Susanna Flood, and now Kelli and Rose. I think it has a very solid shot at revival of a play, especially since proof has been found to be underwhelming by a lot of critics and a lot of people. I will say for myself in a feature review, I'm not letting any of that color my thoughts on the show. And Joe Turner's Come and Gone hasn't really had much buzz yet. Again, I see that later today, so I'll let you know what I think about that. But in the moment, I would say Fallen Angels has a good shot to be sort of like the fifth slot for revival. Yeah, I feel like it's after Oedipus, Death of a Salesman, Marjorie Prime and Becky Shaw. I feel like those four are all kind of solidifying themselves as our revival nominees. And then Fallen Angels is our fifth, unless Bug gets in there, but I feel like Bug was too divisive. But yeah, that's where we're at with Fallen Angels. I give it a light recommendation. It's fun, it's nice, I enjoyed myself. It's not overly hilarious for me, it's not overly memorable. I will remember Byrne and O'Hara's drunk scene, and Rose Byrne's wig the morning after. Those are the two big things I'll remember. And good for them, another show that has a threesome in it. Granted, it's offstage, but this is the third threesome I've seen in a New York show this season. Although two of them, granted, were in Wild Party. So, anywho, that's Fallen Angels. To our next show, Beaches, which opened last night at the Majestic Theater. It is not based off of the 1988 Bette Mither-Barber-Hershey film, but rather on the novel that that film is based off of. The novel by Iris Rainer Dart, who co-wrote the book with Tom Thomas. The score has lyrics by Dart, with music by Mike Stoller. Stoller is famous for being one half of the songwriting team, Lieber and Stoller, writing Hound Dog on Broadway, Yakety Yak. The show is about the friendship between two young women who come from very, very different backgrounds. Cece Bloom and Bertie White, Hillary in the film with Barbara Hershey. Cece is an aspiring singing actress from New York, and Bertie is a rich girl from, I'm not sure they say exactly where, I think Pennsylvania. And they meet one afternoon at Atlantic City while Bertie's family is on vacation and Cece is working in one of the shows. They strike up a pen pal relationship over the years. They reconnect when they're both about 18, 19, and both sort of rub off a little bit on each other. They remain in each other's lives over the years. They have a falling out for a little bit. They come back together. Bertie gets married, gets divorced, has a baby. Cece gets married, becomes a huge star, gets divorced. She helps Bertie raise her child for a little bit before Bertie, sorry, Cece goes back to her career. And then as Cece gets extraordinarily famous, that is when Bertie gets sick and gets sick quickly and Cece comes back to her side to help look after Bertie's child. Bertie then dies, Cece adopts Bertie's kid and sings Wind Beneath My Wings and that's the show. Again, I would say spoiler alert, but the movie is at this point 38 years old. So I feel like everyone knows that Beaches ends with one of the two dying. I call it Valley of the Dolls with Cancer. Even though in the movie, I think it's like a heart virus that she has. The novel never explicitly says what it is that she dies of, and neither does the show for that matter. They just give her a cancer headscarf towards the end to imply that she's very ill and possibly losing her hair, which let's be real, we all associate with cancer. I don't know anybody who's like, how dare you? Hair loss is the classic symptom from that extraordinarily rare heart disease that no one can pronounce, and no one knew the name of until Beaches with Barbara Hershey. I mean, are we all just going to call me problematic now because of that? I don't know. I think we all can calm down on that. Calm down everybody. The show had been in development for the better part of 20 years. When it was announced for the Majestic, we all went, huh? I guess I'll just say this now, that huh is still in place. You don't want to be super cruel to shows because people work hard on them, and time and money is spent, and nobody ever aims to make a bad show. But at the same time, you're going to see the show. You're putting in the time that you cannot get a refund on. We only have so many minutes on this earth. If I chose to spend two and a half hours of my time, of my unrefundable time at beaches, I have the right to say what I thought about it. My first thing I want to say is we all owe the Queen of Versailles a fucking apology. That show got raked over the coals, and it wasn't good. Queen of Versailles was not good. But there was something about Queen of Versailles that you could tell. There was an idea there that did not make the show worthwhile, but made me want to come back and try to work on the show myself. Plus, there were other things on that Broadway stage that were impressive. It was impressively designed. I thought that Michael Arden staged it rather well. Chenoweth, for all of her flaws as a human being and all of her flaws as a performer was extraordinarily game as Jackie Siegel and really pushed herself outside of her comfort zone. She wasn't 100 percent successful, but she was more successful than not. I think overcame a tricky character. While she didn't necessarily fully succeed, she did overcome a lot of her own obstacles. This show, we have a design that is very budget conscious. But not space conscious, which is to say there's not a lot of set, it doesn't look very good, and it leaves tons of empty space on the majestic stage, which is a crime because the majestic stage is basically a football field. Those of you who saw Gypsy know that you can't just have sparse scenery. If you're going to have only a couple of pieces, you have to place them in a very precise and mindful way, so the stage does not look so gargantuan. Especially when you can't even fill it up with a whole lot of actors. That Beach's also has a very small ensemble of people. So we're already talking, aesthetically, this show is low. From a writing perspective, what can one say? The music is not bad. It's not bad music. It's melodic, it's stoller, he knows how to write a tune, but it does feel like from another era. It doesn't feel appropriate to the story, and half of the songs do not have any kind of build, they don't have any kind of style or character, and they're not integrated well into the story. Some songs, even if the melody is solid, some of the songs are just also straight up bad, not just because the lyrics by Dart are bad, but because they just shouldn't be there. There's a song, speaking of Fallen Angels, there are two men in this show, and they play a whole bunch of roles. Specifically, they play Bertie and Cece's husbands. We'd call them love interests, but that's a very loose term in this show. One could say that Bertie and Cece are each other's love interests because they are each other's heroes. They are the wind beneath each other's wings. But the husbands, John and Michael, have a song towards the end of act one, while the four of them are having a beach getaway, and Cece and Bertie are spending the whole night going in and out of the house, and you know, gabbing with each other. And John and Michael sing a song called God Bless Girlfriends. God Bless Girlfriends. And when I tell you, Snipdy Snip Snip, I mean, Snipdy Snip Snip. There are so many songs in this show where the best thing you can say about it is that Stoller wrote not the worst melody. There's no kind words you can say about Dark's lyrics. They are trite. They are simplistic. They are first draft. They are not specific to character at all. Bertie has a song called The Brand New Me that she sings to her mother to sort of defy herself from the chains of her upper class restrictions of what her family and everyone in her life demands that she be. And she sings the song The Brand New Me, and it's exactly what you would expect from someone who's writing a This Is Me song with no details given to them. Like if you were to tell a musical theater writer, I need you to write a This Is The New Me song for a character in a show. And they'd be like, okay, well, who are they? Doesn't matter. Well, where are they from? Doesn't matter. Who are they singing it to? Doesn't matter. That's what a lot of the songs in Beaches are like. This one in particular is pretty fucking bad, but a lot of them are like that. And so a writer who's talented would be like, okay, I guess I'll write rather generic lyrics that could be applied to anyone and be sung to anyone. But let me see if I can give it a decent melody, so there's some kind of pulse to it. That is pretty much every song in Beaches on Rinse and Repeat, Rinse and Repeat. The best time a song is used for storytelling purposes is what I would call the montage song. It's a song called The Letters, and it is chronicling the friendship of Bertie and Cece through their letters to each other over the years, starting with when they're very little, about eight or nine, to when they're both about 17, 18, and then when they're like, you know, early 20s. And it's the only time in the show where you're like, okay, here's a song that's moving the story forward, that is specific to this story, where the lyrics actually sound like they're from these characters that are, you know, talking about things that are specific to them. Just that one song, really. Not saying it's a great song, not even saying it's a good song, but it is the only one where I went, okay, that's how musical theater works. That's good. In terms of the actual story, we are told that Bertie wants to be more than just what her family sets out for her. She wants to be more than just a wife, more than just a Mrs. She goes to college and she goes to law school, where she graduates top of her class. That is where Bertie's journey as a lawyer ends. We never see her work as a lawyer. We never see the change that she claims she wants to make in the world. We never see how she, other than the fact that she spends half of a summer at summer stock being by Cece side and then, spoiler alert, losing her virginity. We never get to see her actually chart any path for herself, even if it then ties into her marrying somebody, which is fine. Marriage is not a death sentence. It doesn't have to be. It can be a good thing if it's something you want. Beaches does not necessarily have that for Bertie. So it's unclear how different of a person she's become by knowing Cece. When the moment she leaves summer stock, she graduates law school but then marries the first guy who wanted her before she even left for school, she goes back to taking five steps backwards, and being a wife and being a classist bitch to Cece about her silverware and her aesthetic, and not trusting that Cece has her best interests at heart when Bertie's husband, who she doesn't even like very much, claims that Cece came on to him. Bertie's more than willing to just accept that fact and go four years without talking to Cece. She just becomes everything that we're told about what she wants for herself, we never actually see, and it never actually pays off. Cece, by contrast, wants one thing, she keeps going for it, but we never actually understand what it is that's keeping Cece from her goals. We are told that she keeps getting cast in small roles because she's simply too good to be playing the leads, which makes no sense. I am not somebody who is obsessed with the film. I don't have a soft spot for it. I haven't seen it in about 20 years. I'm not sitting here going, it has to be the movie. I'm not even somebody who, Bette Midler is not one of my all-time divas. I like her. My favorite Bette Midler movies are In Order, The First Wives Club, and then Ruthless People. End of list. I guess Oliver and Company. That could be another one, I suppose. I'm not a hocus pocus person. I've spoken about this pretty openly. But Bette Midler is not so iconic to me that anyone who tries to do a Bette Midler role, I'm like, fuck you, and Beaches is not a movie to me, where if it's not the movie on stage, I don't care. But there are things that the movie does get right in a way that the musical doesn't. First is that Barbara Hershey's character, Hillary in the movie, Bertie here, you do actually get to see her chart a life for herself. You actually get to see her do work with the ACLU. You see her try to make more change. You see how by being Cece's friend, she is a softer version than a lot of the women who she probably grew up with. That said, there are parts of her that she can't really undo. She is judgmental. She is rather conservative and traditional, but less so than the people she's known. Cece by contrast is incredibly stubborn and incredibly brash and is not very giving just because her best friend has made major strides. It's not enough for someone like Cece. She's got to be exactly like her and Cece is also incredibly career-focused and driven and can't really handle real life. Cece is also very rough around the edges in the film. Bette Midler, for all of the talent and charisma she has, is not this once-in-a-lifetime singer like a Barbara Streisand, where if you have issues with her aesthetic, you can ignore it because the voice is so incredible. Her charisma is not the kind of ease, like say how people feel about Jonathan Groff, where you can forgive something else about them maybe you don't like. Cece is brash, her voice is good, but it also has, again, some roughness to it, and she's a crass person. Ultimately, it's because she's so determined, because she won't take no for an answer, and because she eventually looks into opportunities that are perfect for her, that bolster her profile, that is what leads to her success. Vosk in the show could not be rough around the edges if she tried. Speaking of Streisand, Vosk sounds like 1970s Streisand, which is arguably the most in-control Streisand was ever of her voice. It's also maybe the most smooth listening her voice ever got, but that's a lie. The 80s is the most smooth listening her voice ever got. The 70s though is warming up to that, leading into that sound. Vosk lives in that 1970s Streisand pocket, where it's all very smooth, it's all very beautiful, it's all very easy, it's all in the mask, and that's great for us. But for the character of Cece, it does need to have a bit more of that grit to it. Vosk also doesn't really have a grit about her performance outside of the voice, where you can understand that Cece's crassness is something that's holding her back. Mostly, the show just keeps putting Vosk in terrible clothes and really horrendous wigs to make it seem like she's this ugly duckling when we just all know that she's not. They put a pretty girl with a beautiful voice in bad outfits, and they're like, see how trashy she is? And it's just not the case. She does equip herself well. She is able to land a couple of good jokes, rather to say she's rather to land a couple of not very good jokes well. She's able to sell most of the songs so that way they feel better than they are. And she has a genuine chemistry with Kelli Barrett as Bertie. Barrett is unfortunately saddled with the worst material of the show and the most underdeveloped storyline of all of the characters. In addition to her whole independent career that just gets dropped immediately, when she divorces her husband and decides to be a single mom, they do such a rush job on her journey with motherhood, of her connection with her daughter, and then they do such a rush job on her illness that Barrett has to go from 0 to 100 on a lot of character beats, and they don't sell, and it's not her fault. She's going to the place that the character needs to go to, but the show has not put in the time and the effort and given her the material to make that make sense, to make it pay out. And it's frustrating. As a performer, it must be incredibly frustrating when you have to do that kind of heavy lifting and infuse your character with so much emotion that to a lot of people, it's going to look melodramatic and overacting. And in a way it is because it's not justified, but she is ultimately doing the assignment. Just that the assignment itself is incredibly flawed. The show also makes absolutely zero case for why Bertie and Cece would be friends at all. They don't even have really a connection as kids. There's an argument you can make that, oh, well, the friends you make when you're little, you can grow out of is become different people. That's absolutely the case. There's an idealism you have as a child of just finding somebody who's different from you, who excites you and interests you, and having like all you need is one common interest. Then you can sort of have a bond when you're little. That's sort of where Beaches wants to kind of place its roots. I can't say that the show sells that idea, and the children they have playing Hillary and young Bertie, they speed through their lines in a way that a lot of child actors do, so it's hard to always kind of get what's happening with them. The show wants to kind of constantly draw you back to, well, this is who they were, and look how far they've come. And sure, I suppose, but bringing the children actors back on stage throughout to kind of mirror where Bertie and Cece are at that moment in the show, and to remind you, here's where they started, here's where they are now. It just doesn't, you kind of call BS. It's one of those things like in Follies or Great Gardens, where memory is a very powerful theatrical tool to use, but it has to be used correctly. And the story that it's supposed to be bolstering needs to also make sense and have some sort of meat to it. And there's just no meat to the story that we're watching. They also play around with timelines because they open in the same way that the movie does with a concert of Berties and in this case, a technical rehearsal for Bertie, not for Bertie, for Cece, a technical rehearsal for Cece's variety hour. The show also really fucks around with what time period we're in because the idea that Cece is such a powerhouse superstar in the entertainment industry that she has the number one variety hour, you're like, okay, but is this 1980s? Because it's the 1980s, there's no such thing as a number one variety hour on TV. There's a talk show where she maybe sings a little bit at the end, but they're not doing the Sonny and Cher Show. They're not doing Donny and Marie, not by the mid-80s, possibly the early 70s and mid-70s. But even then, it was on the way out by that point. You're not quite sure exactly what time period we end in. But this is to say, Cece gets a note that causes her to flee her rehearsal and go on the road. She has to make this trip to somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, and you spend all of Act 1 cutting back between the story as we're watching it unfold and Cece in the future make her way to a destination. And she's doing everything she can. She's got to get on a flight. She's got to grab the last cab in a hurricane. And in Act 2, we find out as we reach, as the story reaches its meeting point, it's that she's made it to Hillary's hospital to help her. And the character trait of Cece is that she doesn't do sick. She's really bad at real emotions. And for a minute, she's regretting having gone all the way there. But then she decides, fuck it, she's going to be there for Bertie. And then they do what I can only call a hospice comedy routine, where the song is called A Day at the Beach. And it's Cece and Bertie, with Cece trying to take care of Bertie and fucking up and saying, oh, this is no day at the beach. And then ultimately, the big reveal is she goes, huh, how about we have a day at the beach? And they go to the beach, and that's sort of their thing. There's also, okay, I was with my friend Noah. We saw the show together, and towards the end of the show, Cece takes Bertie to the beach to kind of reconnect and remind her of their roots as children and how their friendship started on the beach, at beaches. They put their feet in the ocean, and they sing to each other about, you know, you're my best or whatever. And we've said to each other afterwards, we're like, didn't that remind you a little bit of little women, of the Some Things Are Meant to Be song? You know, two gals by the ocean singing about life, love, and death. And we changed the lyrics to Some Things Are Meant to Be from Some Things Are Meant to Be to Some Girls Are Meant to Die. So that's a new trait, everybody. Some girls are meant to die. Some girls are meant to die. Is that a tear in your eye? No, no, I think it's just a stye. These are better lyrics than what's in beaches, by the way. The show does end with Wind Beneath My Wings because it seems that the writers at Quyestain allowed the producers to get the rights to the song and Vosk sings it well. But then they stage it so that the bulk of the song, they turn down the lights and they bring in all of these sort of glass orbs and they put Vosk on a runway that juts out over the orchestra. So it looks like she's singing the song in space. And I'm not entirely sure why. It doesn't really make a ton of sense. At least in the movie, before we get to Wind Beneath My Wings, what happens is Cece has a song that was sort of her signature song when she was a kid. She was singing for a lot of auditions called Glory of Love. And after Barbara Hershey dies, Bette Midler in her big concert that we come back to, sings the song again. But instead of it being a jazzy el campo, it's now a ballad. And she says, it's not only until recently that I really listened to the words and understand the words and what the song is about. And so now I would like to sing it for you. And it sort of shows you how far Cece has come as a person. That's not the case here. We don't have really themes or motifs that can come back and pay off for characters to show their development, to show how they're tied together. It's just Wind Beneath My Wings. And it feels very, very tacked on. Yeah, I mean, I've spoken a bit about Vosk and Barrett. I would say of the two of them, Vosk absolutely is, equips herself a little bit better. I can't say that she succeeds. I don't even think she carries the show. She just comes out unscathed, which unfortunately, Kelli Barrett doesn't. And it's not a dig at Barrett. It's just that, like, I don't know anyone who could come out unscathed with the material that Barrett has. The best you can do is come out with your head held high and, you know, prove yourself with the next gig, which she has in the past. Vosk does not overwhelmingly carry the show. The only person I think who could have carried this show is Barbra Streisand circa 1964. Like, funny girl on Broadway Streisand with that voice, with that charisma, and with that just, like, once in a lifetime, once in a generation star presence. Vosk shows that she is a solid actress, she has good instincts, but she isn't quite able to succeed in this. As I said, she does not drown in it. She stays on the beach, she doesn't drown in the ocean. Barrett kind of gets, like, up to her waist in ocean, seawater, but she doesn't fully drown. Everyone else does their best, but this is really a show where it's really about our two female leads. It's not even about the men. They also, a friend of the pod who was at my same performance, I won't say who, text me when the show was over and he said, they make Kelli Barrett take her curtain call in her hospice gown. That's rude. Put that bitch in a nicer dress. Let her have some dignity, but I don't know what a nicer dress would be in beaches. There's not much nicer dress. Tony chances, guys. Let's talk about Tony chances. Vosk is definitely proving to be the one sole chance they have. Score is an option just because we have so few of them, I really do think that Beaches actually now allows Queen of Versailles to get a best score nomination. I think we're looking at Two Strangers, Lost Boys and Queen of Versailles, and then two plays, most likely Death of a Salesman and, insert blank here, maybe Marjorie Prime for best score nominations. If Beaches gets in, it's truly because nominators are like, I don't know if I can put in two plays here, but they just might. Vosk has a very solid shot, I would say. Her show is currently running, which Chenoweth is not. However, I think it comes down to if nominators feel more like Vosk is more successful in a worse show than, say, Lea Michele is. I think Chess is more successful as a night of theater than Beaches. Not hard to be, but still. But I do think that Vosk does better work with her material than Michele does with hers. So that's up to different nominators, how they feel about that. I do think of Vosk as nominated. I do genuinely think that kicks Michele out of Best Actress in a Musical. But who's to say? That's really kind of it. Kelli Barrett, God bless her. I don't think she has a shot here. I don't think any of the supporting players do. While they do have a lot of opportunities to play different roles, it's all sort of for nothing. Design wise, there's nothing to go off of here. I mean, yeah, it's just, guys, it's beaches. It's beaches. Some girls are meant to die. Some shows end with a threesome and shows, some shows end with cancer or heart viruses. Or just, you know, story plot devices. That's beaches for you. Yeah, I'm sorry to end it on that kind of a bummery note, but that's what we got today of the two Fallen Angels, which I like but did not love, and then beaches which I'm sorry to say I did find to be kind of genuinely terrible. There was a lot of talk online from people who were like, I don't know, maybe my pain threshold is higher than others because I didn't think it was that bad. No, it's that bad. It's pretty terribly written. It's pretty terribly designed. There's not much to go off of in terms of staging. There's no great use of space or fluidity in transitions, or overwhelmingly strong actor work in the company. Our lead performers, while they are all smart and talented folks, do not, are not able to overcome all the obstacles that are in their way. They make you realize how talented they are, but that's not really enough. Not, not, not really. And I also always forget just how fucking big the majestic is, because I never felt that huge when Phantom was there. But I think that's sort of the magic of that original production of Phantom, with the design and staging of Phantom. It never always felt like a super huge spectacle. It always felt surprisingly simplistic. But I think that's also because it was very crafty about how it filled the space and didn't make the space feel so large. Beaches and Audra Gypsy make you realize just how fucking huge that stage is. That's it for today, everybody. Sorry to end it on such a bummer, but alas, here we are. We've got a couple more reviews coming up. We got to close out this season. We're going to do a couple more, I think two more episodes on Tony stuff. We have to react to the Outer Critics Circle nominations, the Drama League nominations, Drama Desk nominations come out next week, and then we're going to do sort of a final round of nomination predictions before the actual nominations come out on May 5th. If you haven't bought your tickets yet, please do buy your tickets for the May 3rd Broadway Breakdown show at Green Room 42. I'm reviewing the 2025-2026 theater season. We are going to be covering a lot of these shows. I'll give you guys a little bit more hints. We have a whole gay 80s vampire medley segment, and we're not singing a goddamn note from The Lost Boys, but rather what I think The Lost Boys should be. So take that into account. We have duets of the season, touching on Rocky Horror and touching on Masquerade, touching on Titanic and Heathers because we are including some off-Broadway stuff here. And it's going to be a really fun time. If you haven't joined the sub stack yet, make sure to do so, where you can start seeing some new content that isn't solely the podcast. If you haven't joined the Discord, join the Discord. There's been a lot of discussion about the Tony Awards, about the theater season, about the podcast. We have a whole lot of different takes on my thoughts on shows, your guys' thoughts on shows, a lot of different questions, a lot of people having questions on theater ticket availability and wanting recommendations for different restaurants to go to when they're in town and all that good stuff. And also promoting their own works. We've got a lot of aspiring writers and actors who are listeners of Broadway Breakdown and have joined the Discord channel and have shared their works and shows they have coming up with everybody. And it's really nice to see everybody show up for each other. So thank you for that. Again, if you like the podcast, five-star rating or review really helps us out with the algorithm or five stars on Spotify, if you will. You can also follow me on Instagram, at Matt Koplik, usual spelling. Who do we want to close out with today? We've done Bette Midler, we've done the Vosk, we've done Kelli O'Hara. I'd say Kelli Barrett, but I don't think that there's an official recording of her in anything, maybe Dr. Shavago, but do we really want to do that, guys? I don't think so. I'd rather not. I'd rather not. Okay, you know what we're gonna do? Whitney Basher played the Kelli Barrett role in one of the earlier productions of Beaches, and that's who we're gonna close out with today. We're gonna close out with Whitney Basher singing Another Life from the Bridges of Madison County. So that's it. We will see you guys for the next review. Take it away, Ms. Whitney. Bye.