For King fans, ‘Beautiful’ makes earth move under their feet
Turning down a musician’s request to sing with his band, the woman at the center of “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” asks, “who wants to hear a normal person sing?”
A lot of people, as “Tapestry” demonstrated more than 40 years ago — and as proven anew by the large crowd on hand for Tuesday’s performance of “Beautiful” at the Marcus Center. They got what they came for, thanks to a captivating Julia Knitel, embodying King during the 13 tumultuous years taking her from Brooklyn teen to 29-year-old superstar.
We first meet Knitel playing King at her peak, in a 1971 Carnegie Hall concert following the release of “Tapestry” that captures what is — and isn’t — normal about this extraordinary talent, whom “Beautiful” book writer Douglas McGrath recently described as a “bashful star.”
Alone on stage with a piano, Knitel seems to shy away from the light even as she makes conversation with the audience about coming home.
But as her opening number tells us, King is now so far away — and not just because her reborn California self is worlds removed from the girl she once was. She’s also paradoxically set apart because she successfully gives voice to what so many people feel, through songs driving home what her producer later tells us: “simple is hard.”
In King’s case, it’s also personal. Her achingly vulnerable songs — sung in a plaintive, slightly reedy voice that Knitel channels — tell a story of love and loss that mirrors King’s own. It’s during the “Beautiful” years — 1958 to 1971 — that she and songwriting husband Gerry Goffin moved from shotgun teen wedding to divorce.
Although clearly a jukebox musical that’s particularly reminiscent of “Jersey Boys,” “Beautiful” largely keeps its eyes on that underlying story even as it rapidly moves from hit to hit — underscoring how fully these songs reflect the lives of the couple who wrote most of them together.
Liam Tobin suggests James Dean in his sympathetic presentation of a charismatic but increasingly dark and angry Goffin, a tortured soul making a mess of his marriage because he feels trapped by his life.
Showcasing a funny book stuffed with one-liners, Alaina Mills (pinch-hitting on opening night) and Ben Fankhauser provide comic ballast as friends, fellow tunesmiths and rivals Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, coming together even as King and Goffin fall apart.
The one real sag in “Beautiful” involves overly frequent impersonations by the many groups that charted with hits this quartet wrote; as with the musical “Motown,” there’s too much material and not enough space, in a show where King and her story could have used more airtime.
It’s King’s moments as a singer that earned the biggest applause on Tuesday; it’s King who people are coming to see. On Tuesday, Knitel gave them — and me — a beautiful night.