The fun begins in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical with a supposedly broken-hearted Neil Sedaka singing his big hit Oh Carol atop a TV console. That was not for real but it was cute. Then the goosebumps creep in as a pregnant Carole King gets to sell the first song that she co-wrote with soon-to-be husband Gerry Goffin, Some Kind of Wonderful, which became a big seller for the truly wonderful The Drifters.
The goosey feeling stays throughout, often accompanied by teary eyes as the show moves across Carole’s early life with songs like Take Good Care of My Baby (which went to Bobby Vee), the achingly sweet heart pincher Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (a No. 1 hit for The Shirelles), the urban dweller’s escape song Up On The Roof, the heartbreaking It’s Too Late and other much-loved pop classics. By the time, you get to late Act Two and are watching Carole turn from stage-frightened songwriter to a confident woman and performer with You’ve Got A Friend, you will be bawling your eyes out.
The story, a sanitized version of what had been tabloid fodder for decades, is simple. Sixteen- year-old small town girl Carole turns out to be a good songwriter and gets a break in the legendary music man Don Kirshner’s 1650 Broadway Studio in New York. She falls in love, gets pregnant and marries a fellow songwriter, Gerry. They collaborate on a series of hit songs but he turns out to be a philandering manic-depressive.
Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante as Cynthia Weil and George Schulze as Barry Mann, rivals and bestfriends of Carole and Gerry
Carole endures the marriage for some years because girls of that era are expected to do just that. But one day, she wakes up, leaves Gerry and goes off to Los Angeles to make a new life for herself and her children. There she records her landmark and one of pop music history’s biggest-selling albums, Tapestry. She then conquers her stage-fright and becomes a huge pop star. The show is book-ended by Carole’s much-lauded performance in Carnegie Hall in 1977.
Now, Beautiful may be simple but it is one of the most successful jukebox musicals ever created and is definitely a killer as far as the music is concerned. Leading the line-up are, of course, the works of Carole and Gerry, and her later output as a singer and songwriter. However, writer Douglas McGrath cleverly decided not to concentrate on Carole’s catalogue of songs alone.
Douglas also included hits by other songwriters to firmly set the period, resulting in an enjoyable nostalgic romp from the late ‘50s to the mid-‘70s. You will also hear Little Darling, Splish Splash, Be-Bop A Lula and more plus those composed by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Rivals and best friends of Carole and Gerry, the Barry and Cynthia tandem co-wrote such classics as On Broadway, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling and others.
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is playing this weekend at the Meralco Theater. It is part of the triple-threat Atlantis Twenty line-up of shows in celebration of its 20th anniversary. Angels In America opened the festivities and Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street will close in come October. Heavy stuff those two. So I am thankful that anchoring the center is the lovely trip down memory lane of Beautiful.
As with most Atlantis productions, Beautiful is a polished production directed by Bobby Garcia, who, I must say, was able to assemble a cast that can rival the best of the world’s stages. I wonder where he found those young actors seamlessly singing and dancing their way through the jukebox hits as The Righteous Brothers, Neil Sedaka, The Drifters, The Shirelles, Little Eva, Bobby Vee and others? They are so talented.
I must mention Nick Varrichio, great as the flawed heartthrob Gerry with romantic pop pipes to boot, Mikkie Bradshaw-Volante as Cynthia and George Schulze as Barry, a pair who cannot only deliver fantastic punchlines but can also stop the show with their songs. There are also the always competent Jamie Wilson as Kirshner and Carla Guevarra-Laforteza as Carol’s mother Genie Kleine.
And then there is Kayla Rivera as Carole. Can she really play the piano? She looked like she was — body language and all. Does she really sing that way? You know like the way Carole changes the key in the middle of a bar? I remember Kayla as very good in In The Heights, but she has now become an excellent, a beautiful actress for the Beautiful show.