YOUR KIND OF MUSIC. YOUR KIND OF MUSICAL.
For five years, BEAUTIFUL, the Tony and Grammy Award-winning Carole King musical, has thrilled Broadway with the inspiring true story of one woman's remarkable journey from teenage songwriter to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
From the string of pop classics she wrote for the biggest acts in music to her own life-changing, chart-busting success with Tapestry, BEAUTIFUL takes you back to where it all began- and takes you on the ride of a lifetime.
Featuring over two dozen pop classics, including "You've Got a Friend," "One Fine Day," "Up on the Roof," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," and "Natural Woman," this crowd-pleasing international phenomenon is filled with the songs you remember- and a story you'll never forget.
Everything in Beautiful sounds better on Jessie Mueller. Or, for that matter, on Jake Epstein as Goffin, Jarrod Spector as Mann, and Anika Larsen as Weil. To the extent the show remains bizarrely enjoyable despite its essential hackishness, it's this central quartet of performers who make it happen. (The musical arrangements by Steve Sidwell are also good - and bonus points for hiring Dillon Kondor, King's grandson, on guitar.) Of course, there are the songs themselves, which excuse many faults. At one point we hear an actor playing Neil Sedaka sing his 1959 hit 'Oh! Carol,' supposedly written in heartbreak over King, whom he'd dated. 'It's a song, not a deposition,' King tells her worried mother. Beautiful is no deposition, god knows; there's virtually nothing true in it. But at its best, and only then, it's a song.
...as designed by Derek McLane (sets), Alejo Vietti (costumes) and Peter Kaczorowski (lighting), 'Beautiful' nods so often to Michael Bennett's original production of 'Dreamgirls' that it starts to resemble a bobblehead doll. Originality is clearly not this show's strong suit. With one very important exception. That's Ms. Mueller, a Broadway star in waiting for several years, who here steps confidently into the V.I.P. room of musical headliners...Much of what makes Ms. Mueller's performance so touching is its projection of a lack of confidence. There's a humility to Ms. Mueller's Carole, part of whom wants only to be a good Jewish wife and mother, preferably in the suburbs. She plays ego-boosting, self-effacing geisha to Mr. Epstein's philandering, mentally unstable Gerry....Modesty is not the usual stuff of Broadway showstoppers. And if 'Beautiful' never acquires the flashy momentum of 'Jersey Boys,' it may come in part from the deferential gentleness of its heroine. But when Ms. Mueller sings the show's title song - sitting at a keyboard in, of course, Carnegie for the production's finale - she delivers something you don't expect from a jukebox musical. That's a complex, revitalizing portrait of how a very familiar song came into existence, and of the real, conflicted person within the reluctant star
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