I don’t want to watch these people act. I just want to watch them be.
I remember thinking this as the lights of the Curran Theatre were dimming, and the curtain began to rise.
A musical about the life of Carole King is a risky endeavor. Her music does not necessarily translate to the drama to which Broadway stands tantamount. It is also a difficult undertaking because of a lack of source material, and because artistic license is such a deceitful tool when it comes to reimagining the life of a living, breathing icon.
In putting someone’s story on stage, we run the risk of either cowering from the artifice of theatricality and sticking to hard facts, or embracing it so fully that the final product is extravagant. To walk the line between these two principles troubles us, for fear of ending up in the much-dreaded space of lukewarm reactions. That said, ‘realness’ –whatever that might be– in a musical headed towards Broadway is tough to execute.
The story traces the life of four-time Grammy winner Carole King. Best known for her album Tapestry, King is an inductee to both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Beautiful follows the character of Carole from her beginnings as a sixteen year-old trying to crack her way into the industry, through her larger-than-life romance with lyricist and writing partner Gerry Goffin, into her marriage’s demise and subsequent commercial success as an artist.
There is visible effort on the part of director Marc Bruni to tell this story in a realistic light. The entirety of the music is synchronic: characters do not burst into song out of nowhere; rather, they sing in a studio while onstage, at an audition onstage, or on a stage onstage. There is raw, meaningful dialogue that shows what the characters care about, what propels them to act the way they do, and how they relate to their respective crafts. The plot does not feel choppy, even when the otherwise linear storyline skips over large portions of time. Finally, there is a certain inventiveness in the use of space: taking a leaf out of Next to Normal’s book, Bruni stages characters moving on two levels, one on the stage, and the other on a dais behind and above it. This makes watching the musical a more dynamic experience, and further invites us to pursue Carole’s story. And what a story it is: instead of a portrait of one character, the show explores those that make Carole who she is: her husband Gerry and their best friends Cynthia and Barry. Yet these characters are not mere functions of her. They stand as individuals with their own personal histories that impact their collective future.
It is unfortunate to see the entirety of this workup shoot itself in the foot during the first act. As the story unravels, we see Carole writing songs for other performers, and every time her song is done, these performers show up and sing a part of the song, after which they spirit themselves away with the thunders of semi-deserved applause. Somehow, amidst all of the other attempts to render the story in an authentic light, outbursts of this nature seem needlessly flamboyant, and overly diagrammatic. We understand that King wrote One Fine Day for the Chiffons – we do not need to see them perform it as well.
This problem resolves itself in the second act, as Carole realizes that she, in fact, possesses the talent to be a performer. After mustering the strength to leave her unfaithful husband, she begins to write songs as a form of therapy. This process spawns most of Tapestry’s significant songs: ballads like It’s Too Late, anthems of infatuation like I Feel the Earth Move, and the eponymous Beautiful, a number about finding an intrinsic locus of identity. While the chart-topper You’ve Got a Friend is noticeably missing (à la MGMT not playing Kids at last spring’s Frost), this artistic decision feels natural. And if it doesn’t feel natural, at least it goes in hand with the mission to make the musical feel less showy and commercial.
At its core, Beautiful is a story about an underdog. We root for sixteen year-old Carole, and do not give up as time goes on –though, admittedly, we may sometimes get distracted by an uninvited sequin-clad quartet belting a high F. Regardless, the show features people that embody relatable desires and undertake reasonable actions. I remember the audience gasping when Carole’s husband announces he is seeing someone else at the end of Act I. It would be an understatement to say that it is a challenge to elicit such involuntary reactions in today’s jaded audiences, audiences that claim to have seen, heard, and felt everything. Yet, in the end, that is why we keep coming back to the theatre: for novel lives in which to reside, for the thrill of a new narrative fix, for the silent excitement in anticipation of the curtain rising.
photography from Huffington Post
(‘16, English, Editor-in-Chief) learned most of his English from Cartoon Network. What Bojan cares about: Freud, cities, gazpacho, and you.