NEW YORK (AP) — When Iris Rainer Dart's daughter was in nursery school in the late 1980s, she kept noticing an odd thing happening with her mom and finally confronted her.
“She came to me one day and she said, ‘Mommy, why do all the other mothers come up to you and say, ’I cried'?” Dart recalls. “I said, ‘Well, Mommy wrote a story that makes people cry.’ She didn’t think that was so great.”
A lot of people, respectfully, disagree. That story was “Beaches,”
which celebrates the deep bonds of female friendship as it traces the decades-long intertwined lives of two very different women, the messy Cee Cee Bloom and buttoned-up Bertie White.
“Women’s friends are the ones who get them through this life,” Dart says. “Husbands are great, but they ain’t your girlfriend, and they ain’t the one who’s going to take your call at four o’clock in the morning.”
“Beaches” became one of the great all-time cry-inducing stories even as it transcended mediums. It started as a novel, then a movie starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, a TV movie with Idina Menzel and Nia Long, an audiobook and now a Broadway musical.
Dart, 82, co-wrote the musical's story with Thom Thomas and supplied lyrics to songs by Mike Stoller, half the legendary songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller. “Beaches” stars Kelli Barrett as Bertie and Jessica Vosk as Cee Cee and comes to Broadway after a more than 10-year development period. It opens April 22.
Dart, who has been a regular at rehearsals, was buzzing after a recent run-through. She took note of how her husband — who has seen many performances — reacted. “I watched him from a few rows back pull his handkerchief out of his pocket. And I thought, ‘OK, we’re good. We got him, we got him.’”
Lonny Price, who directs the musical with Matt Cowart, says Dart is not precious about her creation and is always open to changes or fresh ideas.
“She’s an endless font for these characters,” says Price. “You’d think she would have expressed all there is to say about them, but she keeps finding new ways to express them and in humorous and dramatic and very useful ways for a libretto.”
Musical theater was Dart's first love, before she wrote for “The Sonny & Cher Show” and “Cher” and launched a career as a novelist. She started as a child actor in Pittsburgh, twice wrote the varsity musical with “Wicked” creator Stephen Schwartz at Carnegie Mellon University and graduated with a theater degree.
“Beaches” draws on the real-life close friendship Dart developed with her cousin, Sandy, who lived in Miami Beach. Their families would frequently visit each other and meet in Atlantic City or another beach, giving the fictional work its structure. Letters between visits kept the relationship alive.
Sandy married early, moved to Cleveland and had kids right away, following a more conventional path. Dart was an actor rising up through summer stock, then a writer chasing the arts. (There's a bit of Cher in Cee Cee, as there is some Dart.)
“We balanced each other out. What one lacked, the other made up for. So that was what kicked it all off,” Dart says. “I felt as though we were one person.”
At one point in her own life, Dart called Sandy in a panic — not even saying hello — to ask if she had ever had chickenpox. Her son had it now and Dart was pregnant — so the answer could endanger her unborn daughter. Sandy knew the answer.
“She said, ‘You have a pockmark on your left thigh.’ I said: ‘My husband doesn’t know that about me.’ And she says, ‘Honey, we’ve been married longer.’”
In the musical, Dart has given Bertie the song “My Best” with the lyrics: “When I am with her, it's as if we share one heart/And if I ever lost her I would fall apart.”
The musical, like the beloved film directed by Gary Marshall, traces the friendship sparked in Atlantic City in 1951 that's tested over the years by a love triangle, failed marriages, single parenthood and illness.
Cowart says it is a show that explores the often-intense friendships that women maintain: “I see that very much in the difference between my male friends and seeing my wife with her friends. It’s just a different level of closeness. It’s beautiful. It should be celebrated.”
The birth of “Beaches” wasn't always smooth, with Dart's literary agent initially finding metaphorical doors slammed in her face. “She tried to tell the story to publishers, and they said, ‘It’s not commercial. Who cares about two little girls who meet on a beach in Atlantic City?’”
After the publication of Dart's novel “The Boys in the Mail Room” in 1980 — a bestseller inspired about a quartet of trainees in a Hollywood studio mailroom who went on to big things — suddenly people wanted to go back to “Beaches.”
The Hollywood studio that turned the book into a movie wanted to change things — like some names and the illness that Bertie contracts — and Dart chose not to turn her story into a screenplay, on the advice of her husband, Stephen Dart.
“He said, ‘I think you should just write another book or write whatever you want, but don’t try and do their version of the story because you’ll never be happy.’ And he was absolutely right.”
The leap to the stage was immeasurably easy since Dart's love of musicals led her to include plenty of music in the novel, including “You'll Never Walk Alone” by Rodgers and Hammerstein and “I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise” by George Gershwin. The movie, of course, famously added the hit song “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” which has made the transition to stage.
“Everybody loves that song. They identify it with the piece. So, it’s crazy not to use it,” she says. “I stay in a place in New York and the doorman said to me, 'How’s it going Mrs. Dart? You are using the song, aren’t you?'”
Dart says it's a privilege to be able to return to Cee Cee and Bertie: “Maturity changes things. That’s what gives me a better point of view about both of them.”
There's also a bit more Dart herself in the work, like the song “Real Woman,” which has the line, “You'll tell them if you're smart/It's all about the way you feel, woman/Whether a tough or genteel woman/What makes a real woman is her heart.”
Dart says she's thumbing her nose at anti-trans and anti-gay people with the song. “I don’t know if I would have been bold enough to put that into a show years ago. But I want to make that statement.”
