Theater Review

Beautiful weaves fun into the complex tapestry of Carole King's life and music

Midway through the first act of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Carole (Abby Mueller) and her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin (Liam Tobin), argue over whether their most recent collaborations are merely fun songs that lack layered complexities. At this stage in their young lives writing songs for '60s girl and R&B groups like the Shirelles and the Drifters, she is fine with fun, while he wants more complexity.

The whole argument seems a bit like running meta commentary from Douglas McGrath, who wrote the Beautiful book, and director Marc Bruni about this musical itself. While attempting to chronicle the early loves and songwriting years of the real life music icon, Beautiful searches for, and usually finds, a balance of fun and complexity.

The show begins and ends with King’s triumphant concert at Carnegie Hall several months after the debut of her monumental album, Tapestry. From this glimpse into the future we move back to her beginnings, as she sells her first song at age 16 and soon meets Goffin. The first act immerses the audience and King in the factory-like world of hit record production in the 1960s, where songwriters didn’t sing their own material and singing groups many times didn’t write their own music.

Much of the fun of the show comes from these little bits of musical history and many “aha” moments as we learn how those classic '60s songs we all know — even those born decades later, like “On Broadway,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” — were first created. Most of the music and lyrics of Beautiful come from King and Goffin, along with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Some of that complexity arrives as we watch King’s relationship with her husband wither even as they create beautiful music together. Mueller makes King’s self-depreciation and lack of confidence ring true even while we might think: You’re Carole “It’s Too Late” King, kick his two-timing ass. Yet Tobin manages to bring sympathy to the cheating Goffin, whose artistic ambitions, at least, are admirable. If only he didn’t try to get in touch with the music of the times by searching for that new sound in other women’s beds.

The multitude of scenes in the first act with Goffin wanting something more but never being satisfied with his own achievements, while King buys into dreams of some suburban ideal, could get tedious fast, and writer Bruni and director McGrath appear to know this. Almost every marital strife scene is countered with the comic, yet genuine and loving, relationship between Barry Mann (Ben Fankhauser) and Cynthia Weil (Becky Gulsvig).

Fankhauser and Gulsvig are delightful as the friends and songwriting rivals to King and Goffin, but they also serve as a kind of functional and illuminating relationship mirror to the King/Goffin angst. In fact, I became so invested in the Mann and Weil team, after the show I immediately checked online hoping they had stayed together. They have. Curt Bouril as super producer Don Kirshner is another performance that adds lots of lightness to Beautiful.

One issue in the show that does disturb that fun/complexity balance is the length and breadth of the first act. Everyone and everything, including the radio-inspired set designed by Derek McLane, speeds through those early years and many songs of King’s life. (Furniture, pianos, and whole columns of retro speakers are remotely whisked on and off stage with every new scene change.) This keeps the fun level high throughout the show, but at times mutes some of that complexity.

There are so many King and Goffin and Mann and Weil songs to introduce that when we finally get to King’s weaving of her Tapestry album in act two, there’s little time left for Mueller to depict the pain and joy that leads to its creation. Mueller is certainly up to the task, but she often needs to rush though her emotional epiphanies. Many times, director McGrath seems to leave it up to the music to bring that complexity to the story. As King tentatively debuts “It’s Too Late” in a near-empty night club, Mueller puts all the pain of the breakup into each note and word.

In the end, it’s definitely a fun journey as King gets us to Carnegie Hall, but Beautiful might have been all the richer if we could have seen a little more of her later practice, practice, practice — without Goffin.

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Beautiful: The Carole King Musical runs through June 19 at the Winspear Opera House.

A scene from Beautiful.

Photo by Joan Marcus

A scene from Beautiful.

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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