A NATURAL BROADWAY WINNER
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical celebrates handful of tunes you know and love
Beautiful music from a beautiful woman is the promise of the Tony Award-winning show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical that plays at the Jubilee Auditorium Oct. 30 to Nov. 4.
Singer-songwriter Carole King was 16 in 1958 when she wrote and sang her first song It Might As Well Rain Until September.
Between 1958 and 1999, King would write or co-write 118 pop songs that made it on to Billboard’s Top 100, making her the most successful female songwriter in the second half of the 20th century.
Gerry Goffin, her greatest collaborator, was also her first husband and theirs was a turbulent marriage. King would marry three additional times after the divorce and would continue to write and record 25 solo albums, including Tapestry in 1971, which remains her most successful album.
She has sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is a jukebox musical with a book by Douglas McGrath that
tells the story of the early life and career of King, using songs that she wrote, often together with Goffin, and other contemporary songs by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Phil Spector and others.
In 2013, Beautiful premièred in San Francisco and moved directly to Broadway, where it is still playing. The touring version of Beautiful, which will open its six-day run at the Jubilee Auditorium Oct. 30, was directed by Marc Bruni. He has worked with McGrath, an awardwinning writer of such films as Bullets Over Broadway and Emma, since the project was initiated.
The Broadway version of Beautiful will celebrate its fifth anniversary in January at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre where it premièred. The touring version, which will play in Calgary, will celebrate its fourth anniversary in 2019.
Bruni said everyone associated with that original San Francisco production knew they had a hit on their hands because of the ecstatic reaction of the audiences.
“It’s a show for audiences. They know and love the music and by the end of the show they have a real emotional connection to Carole’s story.
“The producers booked the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York before we even finished our tryout run in San Francisco. That’s really rare,” said Bruni when reached in London where he is working on Roman Holiday, a musical based on the 1953 Audrey Hepburn/Gregory Peck film of the same name.
“We moved straight from San Francisco, where we opened in October 2013, to New York in November and had 62 previews before the scheduled première on Jan. 12, 2014. The audiences in New York embraced the show every bit as much as the audiences had in San Francisco.”
Bruni admitted he “was aware of so many of the songs Carole wrote. I just didn’t know she had written them because they had been recorded by such diverse artists as Bobby Vee, The Drifters, Herman’s Hermits, The Chiffons, The Shirelles, The Monkees and Dusty Springfield. It’s such an incredible catalogue of songs that we couldn’t possibly have used even all of her greatest hits, let alone some of the lesser ones. We had to pick and choose.”
To create the book for his musical, McGrath did extensive interviews with songwriters King, Weil, Mann and even Goffin, who was ill and died in 2014.
“The story we tell is honest and candid, which is one of the reasons Carole said she would never come to see the show. She said it would be too painful.
“Then she surprised us in the show’s fourth month on Broadway. She came unannounced and surprised the cast during the curtain call. Since then, Carole has been really supportive of the musical. She comes back to see it whenever we change the star and she attended the London opening in February 2015.”
The musical features such memorable King songs as You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman, I Feel the Earth Move, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, The Locomotion, Up on the Roof, Some Kind of Wonderful and One Fine Day.
Bruni said King ’s music has such a universal and timeless appeal because "her songs are so relatable.
“There is a youthful optimism and a true sense of hope that we all respond to. There is the same kind of hopefulness in her personal and professional relationships, which makes her story just as relatable as her music.”
In addition to the original San Francisco version of Beautiful, Bruni has directed the Broadway version, the two North American tours, the London West End version, the U.K. tour, an Australian version and will work on the planned second U.K. touring version in 2019.
In 2015, Sony Pictures announced it had approached McGrath to adapt his musical for film, but has yet to announce production dates.