Beautiful: The Carole King Musical at the Peace Center
For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the music of Carole King, there couldn’t be a better way to start the New Year than with Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, at the Peace Center through January 5.
I’ll admit to a bias, being a (late) Boomer and a fan of both Carole King and the early 1960s pop that infuses this smash hit Broadway show. (It just closed in New York last fall, after a run of five and a half years.) I saw the musical on its previous visit to the Peace Center three years ago, and loved it then, but this time I was accompanied by a couple of Millennials, testing the show’s cross-generational appeal. Both were born in the 1980s or later and so are too young to remember any of the music in the show from its first appearance.
They loved Beautiful too. There were big smiles all around at intermission and after the show, and Carole King tunes on the car stereo on the ride home. Beautiful clearly has a magic that works on any lovers of classic pop music and singer-songwriter genius.
It’s a super-smart show, a jukebox musical that seems to include the entire jukebox. Rather than invent a fluffy plot and shoehorn in the songs, a la Mamma Mia, this show traces the life and career of its subject, née Carole Klein, using the tunes to set the cultural tone and to comment on the events in King’s life. While songs like “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and “Up on the Roof” speak to the experiences of their songwriters in the tunes’ original incarnations, the heartfelt versions the cast delivers in Beautiful bring out those connections with a natural depth of feeling that’s sort of amazing for songs not written for the stage.
King’s story is remarkable all on its own: She sold her first song by age 16; married her songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, at 17; became a single mother to two young girls by age 25; and recorded one of the most successful singer-songwriter albums of all time, Tapestry, before she was 30.
As if that weren’t enough ground to cover, the show also follows King’s friends and fellow songwriting team (and couple) Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who wrote “On Broadway” and many other ‘60s hits. In addition to the leads singing their own songs with incredible heart as they write them, groups including the Drifters and the Shirelles are faithfully and buoyantly recreated, reproducing that familiar early ‘60s sound and synced up choreography.
The Drifters as portrayed in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
While the musical streamlines events and fiddles a bit with chronology, the basic biography it provides is accurate, and the show’s pointed lessons for women learning to wield their own power remain relevant today. The same can be said of two songwriting teams’ music: While they did produce some fun fluff, like “The Locomotion,” tunes such as “Chains,” “One Fine Day,” “It’s Too Late,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and even “Pleasant Valley Sunday” continue to speak to the emotional lives of modern day adults.
The Broadway touring production is top-notch and entirely physical, without the video projections now popular as replacements for sets on Broadway. The choreography is brilliant throughout, and that includes both the dancing and the countless seamless set switches. Some of the costume changes take place magically, onstage in front of the audience, and all the costumes are slick and handsome and evocative of the period.
The show depends heavily on the talents of its lead actress, and Kennedy Caughell, as Carole, is some kind of wonderful throughout, from playing a teenager to embodying a young wife in crisis — in addition to her amazing vocal talents, which evoke King’s own voice without imitating it. The other leads are equally skilled — James D. Gish as Gerry, Kathryn Boswell as Cynthia, James Michael Lambert as Barry, and the always-amusing Matt Loehr as music executive Don Kirshner.
The large ensemble is a busy bunch, playing musicians and singers and stars and background players and often getting brief spotlight moments, never with any missteps. The duo playing The Righteous Brothers even earned spontaneous applause on their arrival.
The fact that Beautiful lost the Best New Musical Tony Award in 2014 to the contrived and forgettable A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (a show I left during intermission and have barely thought of since) says more about New York theatergoers than it does about Beautiful, which will live on in touring companies and local productions for decades to come. But if you want a taste of the original Broadway magic, get to the Peace Center before January 5.
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical runs through January 5 at the Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina. For details and tickets, visit peacecenter.org.
(Photos by Joan Marcus, courtesy of The Peace Center)
Kennedy Caughell as Carole King in Beautiful.
