Covering, and Uncovering, Carole King
By • July 11, 2024 0 655
A few years back, this Late Boomer went with some Early Boomers to see “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” on Broadway. It was my sister’s birthday gift to herself.
Nominated for seven Tonys in 2014, “Beautiful” is a bouncy jukebox show. But this hardbitten arts journalist couldn’t help tearing up.
Why the eye-water? Because in 1971, when D.J.s were wearing out the grooves of King’s “Tapestry” album, I was 11 years old.
The show’s covers of “I Feel the Earth Move,” “So Far Away,” “It’s Too Late” and other King hits made the poignant years of puberty come rushing back. I felt like yelling out: “No fair!”
Olney Theatre Center’s production of “Beautiful,” directed by Amy Anders Corcoran, opened last week. Appearing as King — a role for which Jessie Mueller won Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical — is vocal coach and YouTube phenom Natalie Weiss.
She and Towson University-trained Michael Perrie Jr., who plays King’s songwriting partner and husband Gerry Goffin, weren’t 11 when “Tapestry” came out; they were 14 and 19 years short of being born. For that matter, Mueller’s birth was 12 years away.
Does King’s music speak to Gen Xers and Millennials, the Boomers’ kids and grandkids?
Natalie Weiss as Carole King in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” at Olney Theatre Center. Photo by Teresa Castracane. Courtesy Olney.
Of those turning up at Olney, Corcoran says: “Some of them know it — and some of them are discovering it through their love of Natalie, and how cool is that?”
The bottom line, she adds, is that “Carole’s music, along with the other music in this show, is universal about things we all deal with every day.”
Take “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” — music by King, lyrics by Goffin. The recording by the Shirelles, a Black “girl group” from Passaic, New Jersey, hit number one in 1961, with 20-year-old Shirley Owens asking her boyfriend if, for him, their relationship is “a lasting treasure” or “a moment’s pleasure.” King sings a slowed-down version on “Tapestry.” (In last year’s “LLYLM,” on the other hand, Rosalía sings: “Who needs the honesty? Baby, lie like you love me.”)
Between the Shirelles’ doo-wop-with-strings arrangement and King’s piano-bench solo, our heroine went from Queens College co-ed (she and Goffin dropped out) to Laurel Canyon songstress, on the cover of “Tapestry” with loose long hair, bare feet and a cat. Her personal transformation is at the heart of “Beautiful.”
The scenes set in the late 1950s and early 1960s are a musical flipbook of the years when pop songwriters and producers were clustered along two blocks of Broadway, just north of Times Square. The Brill Building, 1619 Broadway, gave its name to that seat-of-the-pants era, when songs were banged out in cubicles, matched up with hit-hungry singers and vocal groups fresh from high school, then recorded with whoever was handy.
King and Goffin were across Broadway in number 1650, writing on contract for Aldon Music, launched in 1958 by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner (Bobby Smith at Olney). The neighboring songwriting couple was Cynthia Weil (Nikki Mirza) and Barry Mann (Calvin McCullough), who were to write “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” with Phil Spector for the Righteous Brothers.
Performances of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Shirelles style; “Lovin’ Feelin’,” Righteous Brothers style; and King and Goffin’s “The Loco-Motion,” Little Eva style (at Olney, Ariana Caldwell plays Eva Boyd, the couple’s babysitter), are crowd-pleasers. The music director for Olney’s production is Christopher Youstra and the choreographer is Ashleigh King.
Goffin, who died in 2014 at age 75, is the bad guy in Douglas McGrath’s compressed narrative, the cheating husband who blows his last chance. Pregnant at 17, King married him in 1959 and divorced him in 1968. The silver lining was that, post-split, she headed for the other coast, let her hair down and decided to share her feelings in her own voice.
As recalled by King’s then-new friend, James Taylor (unmentioned in “Beautiful,” reportedly at his request): “It really was a perfect moment that Laurel Canyon period. Carole lived up there, Joni [Mitchell, whose ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ came out in 1970] and I lived in her house there for the better part of a year. The record companies were relatively benign and there were people in them who cared about the music and the artists — it hadn’t become a corporate monolith yet.”
Recorded the same year with the same backing musicians, “Tapestry” and Taylor’s “Mud Slide Slim” both included a version of King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Also on “Tapestry,” and the show’s big closing number: “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” written by King and Goffin and made famous by Aretha Franklin in 1967. Franklin brought down the house with it when King received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2015.
“Carole just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ and holding her head. She had never seen Aretha play piano and sing her song,” said Rickey Minor, the Honors music director that year, in a 2018 New York Times interview. You can watch the moment on YouTube.
Though Franklin is gone, King is still with us at 82. A movie version of “Beautiful” has long been in development; Daisy Edgar-Jones just announced that she won’t be playing the lead.
In the meantime, “You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your heart,” as the lyrics to “Beautiful” remind us. I’m betting those words will be sung on July 31 at Olney’s “70s Sing-a-long” with Karen Vincent.
‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’
Through Aug. 25
Olney Theatre Center
2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road
Olney, Maryland
301-924-3400
