It’s hard to beat the exuberance of Beautiful. Of all the jukebox musicals, it has, I suspect, the longest time span of songs, so there are at least two generations that see the show and try to resist the urge to dance in the seats.
It is, like so many of these shows, the background music to many of our lives, but the show is more than that. It’s about determination and flexibility and energy and the joy of being creative. That sets it, to some degree, apart from the others in the jukebox musical genre; there’s a real story here that seems to draw people in even more than, say, Jersey Boys does, which also has a semi-accurate story line but doesn’t seem so personal.
Carole King was writing songs, and began selling them while she was in high school in the 1950’s. She met Gerry Goffin at Queens College, where she was enrolled at age 16. They became a couple, writing partners – he did lyrics – and soon thereafter spouses and parents. It took a little while before they were successful enough to quit their day jobs, but the number of their big hits kept rising. Turmoil in their personal lives? Why, yes. But nothing seemed to stop the music.
And that’s to our benefit. The music sounds great from the get-go, especially a multi-hit montage of the hits that came out of 1650 Broadway (not the famous Brill Building, but across the street). It’s not quite a medley, with sometimes only four bars or so, and lots of things going on at once, but a great mashup of songs. The Fox’s sound system has never sounded better, too, neither blowing out eardrums nor muffling anything.
It’s splendidly cast, with Sarah Bockel as Carole, from teenager to mature woman, very believable. Gerry Goffin is Dylan S. Wallach, charming and brilliant and unhappy and tortured, carrying full weight as a key to much of what happened with King. Another pair who began writing songs in the time period, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, have a big part in the show, and they’re played by Alison Whitehurst and Jacob Heimer, she all style and strength and he the hypochondriac who’s smitten with her; their songs are in here as well. Carol’s mother Genie adds a lot to things; she’s Suzanne Grodner, who tosses off some particularly funny lines. Don Kirshner, the music producer, is courtesy of James Clow, who amiably pushes his stable of artists to greater heights, including people like Neil Sedaka (whom King briefly dated in high school), Bobby Darin, and Phil Spector, long before he became an oddly coiffed defendant in a strange murder case.
The clothing is close enough to make us remember what many of us wore in those days before pantyhose. (How on earth could women get enough air wearing girdles?) And dance moves in heels considerably higher than what we see onstage, for which all the women in the cast should be eternally grateful, probably led to more sprained ankles than cobblestones after a night’s revelry.
But that leads into something that seems more common these days. Dance numbers, especially with smaller groups of dancers, seem considerably less coordinated than one would expect from professionals. If there are three or four, one person will too often be a half-beat behind or not fully in position. In a serious professional production, that’s a real flaw. It happens here. It’s less noticeable in the large numbers because there’s less simultaneous movement in most modern choreography. But things, not just with this company, are slipping on this component. Too bad, but it’s the most serious complaint I could offer about this joyous piece of work.
Beautiful
through March 17
Fox Theatre
527 N. Grand