SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL
Carole King’s life through music
The earth might not have moved under my feet during the opening night performance of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical at the Jubilee Auditorium but my heart definitely trembled.
Those wonderful old pop classics, such as Some Kind of Wonderful, Take Good Care of my Baby, Will You Love Me Tomorrow and Pleasant Valley Sunday, that King wrote with Gerry Goffin are pure nostalgia, especially the way writer Douglas McGrath weaves them into the story of King and Goffin’s turbulent relationship and how director Marc Bruni and choreographer Josh Prince stage them.
King and Goffin began writing together when she was barely 17 and he was 20, and they married a year later when she discovered she was pregnant.
There’s was a marriage fraught with problems as it turned out Goffin had bipolar disorder. When he was manic he became a womanizer, sleeping with several of the singers who covered his and King ’s songs.
The couple’s best friends were the writing team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, who turned out such hits as He’s Sure the Boy I Love, You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling and Walking in the Rain. They, too, become part of the show.
The plot McGrath creates for Beautiful, especially in the first act, is really just an excuse to bring in those great old songs and it works so well because there is a playfulness in the dialogue that reflects the uptempo melodies and catchy lyrics.
At the top of the show, when Kind goes to New York’s famous Brill Building at 42nd Street and Broadway to sell her song It Might As Well Rain Until September, the stage features at least six separate areas where writers are working on, and singing, such hits as Love Potion #9, Splish Splash I was Taking a Bath, Poison Ivy, Stupid Cupid and There Goes My Baby. They mesh into a frenzied medley that defines golden oldies.
For Calgary’s opening-night performance of Beautiful, Canadian songstress Kaylee Harwood, a Shaw and Stratford festival alumna, stepped from being an understudy into the show’s feature role of King.
With only 90 minutes’ notice that she was up that night, Harwood dazzled from her opening of So Far Away to her emotionally electric version of the signature song Beautiful.
Harwood has to take King from age 16 to 32, which she does with as much credibility as ease. She brings a youthful naivete to the young King that explains why she was oblivious to Goffin’s mood swings and philandering and why she would forgive him so many times.
In the second half of the show, Harwood’s King is more introspective and guarded and vocally she goes from effervescent to melancholy, especially with You’ve Got a Friend, but she shows us King ’s personal and professional triumph with her cover of You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.
As Goffin, Dylan S. Wallach layers his performance with more emotional depth and troubled angst than we expect in a musical and, when he sings Some Kind of Wonderful, it’s obvious why King fell under this man’s spell.
As writing duo Weil and Mann, Alison Whitehurst and Jacob
Heimer are used primarily as comic relief. He’s an obsessive hypochondriac and she suffers from commitment phobia. This second-banana couple is a well-established musical theatre tradition as is the requirement that Whitehurst have a dynamite voice, which she certainly does.
Also used as comic foils to Harwood and Wallach’s romantic leads are Suzanne Grodner as King ’s Jewish mother and James Clow as music mogul Don Kirshner.
In the first act, when many of the pop tunes are turned over to The Drifters, Shirelles, Little Eva or The Chiffons, the choreography first gives us the cliched moves of these singers and then spins them out further into mini-production numbers. That doesn’t happen in the second act, where the songs are used more for their emotional impact than their pizzazz.
Beautiful is a true jukebox musical, more along the lines of Jersey Boys than Mamma Mia!, and a very close cousin to 1984’s Leader of the Pack, a jukebox tribute to King ’s contemporary Ellie Greenwich.
With the popularity of Jersey Boys and Beautiful, there are whispers of similar jukebox tributes to Dion DiMucci (Runaround Sue), and Tommy Roe (Sugar, Sugar), and there is a Tina Turner jukebox show currently in London headed for Broadway. Calgary producer Jeff Parry’s Foreigner musical Jukebox Hero is headed for a Toronto tryout in February.
The response of the Calgary audience explains why producers are scrambling to create these shows. The time warp these songs create is irresistible.