A TUNEFUL TAPESTRY
Carole King’s story continues to resonate in ‘Beautiful’ musical
Carole King’s iconic status was cemented by the time Douglas McGrath sat down to write the book for “Beautiful: the Carole King Musical” a decade or so ago.
He still “didn’t know what it was gonna be” as he commenced, but McGrath figured it out, of course.
“Beautiful” has been nothing but a hit since its September 2013 try-out in San Francisco. It won two Tony Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album and a pair of Laurence Olivier Awards in the U.K. It's become a popular touring production worldwide, and there's been talk for years about a film adaptation, though firm details have yet to surface.
McGrath certainly had material to draw from: King's career as a hit songwriter with ex-husband and lyricist Gerry Goffin, and as a performer herself whose 1971 album “Tapestry” went 13-times platinum and is still one of the best sellers of all time. She's had a hand in 118 Billboard Hot 100 singles and is a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee — with Goffin in 1999 and on her own in October. King, now 79, is also in the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Kennedy Center Honor.
More recently she's been nominated for a Grammy Award and short-listed for an Academy Award for co-writing “Here I Am (Singing My Way Home)” for last year's Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”
But, McGrath says by phone from his home in New York, it took him a minute to get a bead on exactly what “Beautiful” should be.
“I was asked to write a show about Carole and her husband and their closest friends, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who were also songwriters,” remembers McGrath, 62, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his “Bullets Over Broadway” screenplay in 1994 as well as Tony and Drama Desk nominations for his “Beautiful” book. “At the beginning I only knew it was going to be based on some portion of their lives, but that's about it.”
Through interviews, “at great length,” McGrath began to piece the story together, but not without some stumbles along the way.
“I remember I told them my idea … a musical about kids chasing out the old guard so they could create the new sound of rock ‘n' roll,” he recalls. “Carole's face lit up. I knew I had nailed it. She leaned forward to share her reaction — ‘That,' she said, ‘is completely wrong!' ‘What?!'
“‘We idolized Gerswhin and Porter and Kern and Berlin,' she told me. … As teenagers they changed the sound of popular music but they were traditionalists at heart — rock ‘n' rollers but classicists, too. How surprising.”
That, in turn, became something of a basis for both surprising and illuminating audiences with “Beautiful.” Incorporating more than two dozen songs, mostly from the Goffin-King and King songbook, the musical tracks King's early life as a prodigy in New York, whose promise was realized as she wrote hits for the Shirelles (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), the Drifters (“Up on the Roof”), Little Eva (“The Locomotion”), the Chiffons (“One Fine Day”) the Monkees (“Pleasant Valley Sunday”) and many more before splitting from Goffin in 1969.
“There's never an intermission I've been to where people aren't saying, ‘I didn't know she wrote that …'” McGrath notes.
The writer's own connection, meanwhile, goes all the way back to his youth growing up in Midland, Texas.
“I would be talking to them and I could picture myself back on the floor of my bedroom, where I used to listen to music,” he says. “I can remember seeing that Goffin-King credit on the 45s, thinking it was such an unusual name. When my sister first saw it she thought it said Coffin-King, like, ‘Wow, what's going on?'”
More than just the music, however, McGrath saw “Beautiful” as a chronicle of the human interactions in the songwriters' stories — courtships, relationship, competition and, in the case of King and Goffin, a bitter divorce, but an “affectionate friendship” before Goffin's death in 2014. Mann and Weil have been married since 1961.
“The show is very much about forgiveness,” McGrath says now. “On the surface it's about creating music and it's about Carole's career and all those things, but at the heart of it it's about forgiving people for their weaknesses.
“Whatever time we're in, that's always a welcome thing to hear and see, I think. I think that's part of the reason people have felt so warmly towards it for all these years.”
“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” runs Jan. 4-9 at the Fisher Theatre, 3011 W. Grand Blvd., Detroit. Tickets are $39 and up at 313-872-1000 or broadwayindetroit.com.