King and Bacharach’s Brill Building brilliance, rearranged for the stage
6 / 10
Certainly, its prime attraction is the marvellous Jessie Mueller, avoiding impersonation, but otherwise perfectly channeling the contradictions of King (neé Klein), as she goes from precocious 16-year-old tunesmith in the late fifties to singer/songwriter star with the release of her seminal album Tapestry in 1971. Jake Epstein, the Canadian talent who first rose to fame onDegrassi: The Next Generation, ably co-stars as her husband/lyricist Gerry Goffin with whom she wrote chart toppers like Some Kind of Wonderfuland The Locomotion for artists like The Drifters and Little Eva...With a spotty script by Douglas McGrath, Beautiful often feels like an extended (and somewhat sanitized) episode of TV's Behind the Music...King, in this version of the story anyway, handles her husband's affairs and breakdowns with admirable restraint and understanding. This doesn't quite work as drama, though Mueller is such a scene stealer, so charming in her self-deprecation, that Beautiful never falls entirely flat.
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