BWW Reviews: BEAUTIFUL Really Does Try To Make It
7 / 10
Unfortunately, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann are the secondary couple in Beautiful, a musical biography of Carole King that frequently pushes its central character aside for more interesting and entertaining moments played out by its skilled and talented supporting ensemble. It's no fault of top-billed star Jessie Mueller, who grabbed Broadway's attention for her jazzy stylings in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever and displayed crack comical chops in The Mystery of Edmund Drood, that her first original starring vehicle downplays her talents until the last half-hour or so of the evening, as she plays a young Brooklyn girl with ambition who grows into a woman who seems content to stay in the background and live an ordinary suburban married life until circumstances force her to find her own voice....Beautiful's central plot is more of a soapy, shorthand connect-the-dots between hit songs....By the time Mueller is allowed to vocally let loose on 'A Natural Woman' and wrap up the evening by wrapping her heart around the title tune, the genial inoffensiveness of the musical's creaky dramatics has denied her any chance of truly connecting the emotions of the songs to the character she's been playing all night, reducing the moments to merely chances to admire the artistry of a rising Broadway star being granted center stage. And for many, that'll be enough to make Beautiful a swell night out.
