Carole King and friends make some Beautiful music at the National Theatre

Joan Marcus

‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’, ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’, ‘The Loco-Motion’, ‘One Fine Day’, ‘Up On the Roof’, ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’. Some of the biggest hits of the 1960s by some of the biggest artists of the 1960s, and while the artists from The Shirelles to Aretha Franklin got all of the glory, did you ever stop to think about who actually wrote those songs? During that era, it was rare for an artist to write and perform their own music, and you might be surprised to learn who did write those hits.

It was none other than Carole King and her partner (eventually husband) Gerry Goffin. And now the Tony, Drama Desk, Olivier and Grammy Award winning Broadway musical Beautiful — The Carole King Musical is making its way across the country, bring King’s story to life in the most ‘beautiful’ way. And it’s not just the story of King and Goffin, but their friends and musical competitors Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann as well, a successful songwriting team in their own right (‘On Broadway’, ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’).

The show starts out with King’s solo performance at Carnegie Hall not long after she won several Grammys for her first album Tapestry. As she ends a song, she begins to tell us a bit about her life growing up in Brooklyn at which point the rest of the show becomes a flashback, first to the teen-aged Carole hoping to sell a song to music producer Don Kirshner, meeting Gerry Goffin in college and becoming a songwriting team, then a married couple with a child. As the couple become more successful, Gerry quits his day job and works full time writing songs with Carole.

But before he quits his job, he nearly misses a deadline for a song for The Shirelles and a bold, brash Cynthia Weil enters the room, forcing an audition on Kirshner. Gerry’s lyrics are incomparable, but Kirshner likes Weil and pairs her with the neurotic Barry Mann, and the two teams become friends and competitors, always vying to get a song to Kirshner and to Number 1 on the Billboard charts. While Carole is enjoying the success and her family, Gerry is beginning to feel restless, blatantly telling Carole he’s going to have an affair with singer Janelle Woods (a fictionalized version of a real singer with the group The Cookies). In the show’s second act, King is trying to hold her marriage together while balancing a career and family until she can’t take any more and finds her own voice.

Beautiful is a truly uplifting and enjoyable theatrical experience, never allowing King’s darker moments become too dark. Surprisingly, though, it does leave out a lot of information: she made demo records in high school with her friend Paul Simon, and that she collaborated on ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ with James Taylor, who is never mentioned in the show. Perhaps neither is mentioned for legal reasons (or they just didn’t want to add another character to the show), but the implication is that she wrote ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ alone. It’s an odd little omission.

Joan Marcus

Regardless, if you don’t know any of that, the show is just wonderful from beginning to end. The show’s production design is simple but effective, consisting of a series of sliding panels, two two-level structures on either side of the stage, and various pieces of furniture, including a piano or two, that glide across the stage for each scene, whether it be at Carole’s home, the office, a TV studio or a nightclub. The staging is also clever in how it presents the songwriters songs, as they hand them off to Kirshern and groups representing The Drifters, The Shirelles and The Chiffons take the stage to perform them. You can’t help but smile, tap your feet and clap your hands when hearing all of this familiar music. This being the second time I’ve seen the show, I really was able to marvel at more of the technical details of the staging, how the actors move about the stage, and especially the choreography for the various musical groups. The guys playing The Drifters have some great moves, and Little Eva and her back-ups really put some motion into ‘The Locomotion’.

Lighting design also helps differentiate between settings (and seems purposeful in setting the mood or emotional response from the audience with a subtle use of color), and the costume design is impeccable to the period and in a few case quite magical. When we first meet the Shirelles, they’re in street clothes while King pitches ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ to them, promising a full string arrangement. As the girls walk behind a panel in the center of the stage, they appear in the blink of an eye in a completely different outfit. This happens a few more times, most notably with Little Eva as she goes from babysitter to singer of ‘The Locomotion’ right before our eyes. It’s an amazing transformation.

The cast is also spectacular from the smaller parts like Kirsher and King’s mother (who steals the show whenever she’s on stage) to the four primary actors. Jacob Heimer is wonderful as Barry Mann, getting the bulk of the show’s funniest dialog, especially when it’s relating to his various neuroses. He’s got a great voice too, and really strums away on an electric guitar during his presentation of ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’. Alison Whitehurst is also terrific as the sassy, wise Cynthia Weil and she has a voice that can raise the roof. Whitehurst also has a way with the one-liners, but we also feel the friendship she shares with Carole. Two great performances.

Joan Marcus

Gerry Goffin is played by Dylan S. Wallach, giving a terrific performance as the tortured Goffin, allowing us to see and feel the love he had for Carole, and then making us angry for breaking her heart. Wallach has a great voice and it’s to his credit that Goffin doesn’t become a total villain, righting his wrongs by the end of the show, as best as he can anyway. It’s a great performance full of conflicted emotions.

Of course, the star of the show is Carole King and she is played to perfection by Sarah Bockel (who was the understudy for Carole in the previous tour). Bockel has a great voice and puts her own little spin on some of King’s classic songs but she sells them well. Her acting is also top notch, letting you feel all of Carole’s emotional ups and downs throughout her life, getting a cheer from the audience when she tells her mother she’s finally leaving Gerry. If there is one thing that distracts from her performance, it’s the series of bad wigs she — and Whitehurst — have to wear. Whitehurst’s initial helmet ‘do never looks natural, and Bockel’s 1970s soccer mom wedge is particularly offensive, and it ages her 20 years. Hopefully as the show continues its run, someone in the hair department will properly style the wigs.

If you only know Carole King from her solo career, run to the theatre nearest you and check out Beautiful for a night of great performances, great music and a great production from start to finish. And stay for the sing-along at the end to ‘I Feel the Earth Move’.

Beautiful — The Carole King Musical is currently at the National Theatre in Washington DC through December 30. The show will continue well into 2019, visiting cities such as Philadelphia, Rochester, Boston, Hartford, Durham and more, with additional cities to be announced.

Beautiful — The Carole King Musical runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes with one intermission.