Holdren in Vulture takes the time to call out most of the members of the cast by name...while saying the show is dire.
Beaches Did Make Me Sad, But Not the Way It Wants To
A ton of performing talent, led by Jessica Vosk and Kelli Barrett, is in the service of enormous and unexamined clichés.
https://www.vulture.com/article/beaches-made-me-sad-but-not-the-way-it-wants-to.html
"The fact that Jessica Vosk is singing her butt off as Cee Cee up on the Majestic stage, and really doing her best underneath an endless succession of red wigs, is therefore both good and, well, not bad but somehow sad. It’s nice to hear great singers sing. It’s sad to hear them pour themselves out in service of something so fundamentally trite — and something that, in Vosk’s case, won’t ever emerge from a shadow no matter how well she lands the punch lines and rattles the rafters."
...
"Let’s not leave hard-working actors to sell half-baked goods or make them use their chops to muscle life into the lifeless eight times a week. Because along with Vosk, there is a lot of vitality in Beaches, most especially bursting from the four young performers who play childhood and teen versions of Bertie and Cee Cee. Again, more is more, but at least here that more is giving some talented kids the chance to shine. As the teens (along with various other roles), Bailey Ryon and Emma Ogea add spark to the contrivance of that epistolary number (“Show the World Who You Are”), but it’s really Zeya Grace and Samantha Schwartz as the littles who scamper away with big chunks of the show. While the sexed-up Baby June mode in which Dart has fashioned little Cee Cee is sometimes unnerving (“Stick out your titties!” she squeals at a shocked baby Bertie), Schwartz is one hell of a mini-dynamo. I’m both excited and worried for her. There’s so much skill there, and so much joyful effervescence. I hope she can maintain both. And that the future gives her better places to go than Beaches."
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