Beaches - The Musical

Beaches begins with two girls meeting by chance on a boardwalk one summer, one loud and hungry for an audience, the other quiet and careful, and follows the friendship that carries them through the next thirty years of ambition, envy, distance and the thing neither of them sees coming.

Cee Cee wants to be famous and says so constantly. Bertie is the one with the manners, the education and the composure everyone else praises. They write letters, lose touch, find each other again, fall out over a man, and keep circling back, because whatever else fails, the friendship is the fixed point. The story lets both of them be difficult, which is why the closeness reads as real rather than sentimental.

The musical comes from Iris Rainer Dart's 1985 novel. Dart wrote the lyrics and, with Thom Thomas, the book. First staged in 2014, it was substantially rebuilt a decade later around a new score by Mike Stoller. The songs sit in mid-century pop and cabaret, which suits a character who makes her living on a stage.

It is unapologetically a tearjerker and it knows it. The pleasure is in the bickering, decades of it, sharpened by two people who know exactly where the other is soft. The score carries the emotional weight, including Wind Beneath My Wings, a song most of the audience arrives already knowing.

It is made for anyone who has a friendship older than most of their opinions. Hearing those songs land in a room, rather than through a speaker, is what turns a familiar story into something that catches people out.