Theatre Royal Brighton – until 2nd April 2022
Reviewed by Sue Bradley
4****
In our world of modern music, we are usually blissfully unaware of the writers – we know (or, at least, know of) the artist, but who creates the songs for them to sing?
Carole King may not be a household name, particularly this side of the Atlantic, but she was a genuine pioneer, and her solo album Tapestry, released in 1971, helped to introduce the concept of the intelligent and articulate singer/songwriter to a much wider audience. I would be willing to bet that a high proportion of the older members of the audience at the Theatre Royal Brighton have had, and probably still have, a copy of Tapestry in their record collection. And King’s achievements are all the more remarkable for her being a woman in the largely male-dominated world of songwriting, especially at that time.
But King’s story started a decade earlier when she, at the age of 17, together with lyricist and future husband Gerry Goffin, wrote Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, made famous by the Shirelles. King and Goffins’ troubled relationship, and also their friendly rivalry with another songwriting team (Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil) provides the backdrop against which the musical Beautiful delivers a host of familiar songs. Rather than trying to weave a story around the songs, this show lets the songs do a lot of the work. There are so many that are familiar – you will be astonished by how many of them were written or co-written by King.
The show eases us in without a grand opening – the house lights are up and the cast drift on, until eventually Carole (played by Molly-Grace Cutler) sits at the grand piano. As soon as she starts to sing we know how good this show is going to be. We soon come to realise that all the music we hear will be performed by the actors. Playing and singing everything, including an impressive array of brass instruments, they do this with evident enjoyment – many of them swapping instruments with apparent ease.
Of course, since there are groups like the Shirelles and the Drifters represented, there is some fine dancing too – and, if the dance moves don’t quite have the effortless “cool” of the originals, they are still believable and help to transport us back to earlier times.
The set is a stylised recording studio and this provides a neat solution to the perennial problem of how to have live drums on stage without them drowning everything else out. In this case the answer is simple – put them in the dedicated drum-booth found in most studios! The sound design for this show, by Tom Marshall, and directed onstage by Dan De Cruz, was excellent and made it a pleasure to listen to the music.
Carole’s journey from talented “Plain Jane” to Carnegie Hall star is affecting and unaffected. Molly-Grace Cutler sings the songs with real heart and holds the centre effortlessly. Particular mention, too, to Jos Slovick as Barry Mann who provides many comic moments with his insecurities and hypochondria and then reveals one of the best voices of the cast.
Closing the show with a rousing version of Beautiful from Tapestry, the cast and this production completely deserved the standing ovation we were more than happy to give. This was an excellent evening and I can only hope that future audiences enjoy the show as much as we did.