You’re beautiful (not the James Blunt song … )

This next post takes us back to January 2018, which is when I went to see the Carole King musical ‘Beautiful’ with my lovely Mum, our awesome friend Phyl and her cousin, Carolyn, at His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen. ‘Beautiful’ tells the life story of the extremely talented and six-time Grammy winner, Carole King (born 1942 in New York), up until she released the album ‘Tapestry’ in 1971. (Interestingly, the brand-new Apple music documentary series, ‘1971: The year that music changed everything’, has an episode that includes Carole King and ‘Tapestry’.) This is another jukebox musical (detecting a bit of a theme with the last couple of posts) featuring songs written by Carole King, including music from ‘Tapestry’, which is one of my all-time favourite albums even though it was 29 years old when I was born. The musical features songs such as ‘You’ve got a friend’, ‘It’s too late’, ‘Will you still love me tomorrow?’ and ‘Beautiful’. TV fans might be interested to know that even though it’s not in the musical, her song ‘Where you lead’, which is also from ‘Tapestry’, was actually the theme song for the show ‘Gilmore Girls’. 

 The musical ‘Beautiful’ depicts Carole writing the songs with her husband, Gerry Goffin (they were married 1959-68), as well as giving a sense of her friendships and writing style. The show also references her life as a mother and looks at the groups and artists (such as the Drifters and the Shirelles) who performed the songs she wrote before ‘Tapestry’ and took them into the charts. It explores her personal life and relationships and, for example, we hear how Neil Sedaka briefly dated a very young Carole King and wrote the song ‘Oh, Carole’ about her (which she responded to with her own song ‘Oh! Neil!’). ‘Tapestry’ (now 50 years old!) came out three years after her divorce from Gerry Goffin, was a huge hit and stayed in the American charts for over six years, proving her incredible talent and versatility as a songwriter and performer. 

 Despite taking place over a number of years, the same actress plays Carole right the way through the show. In the production that we saw, she was portrayed by a very talented actress and singer named Bronté Barbé, who was a finalist in the 2010 BBC programme ‘Over the rainbow’, which was looking to cast the role of Dorothy in an Andrew Lloyd Webber revival. Again, TV fans might be interested to know that in 2018, Melissa Benoist, who played Marley in ‘Glee’ and Kara in ‘Supergirl’, played Carole King on Broadway and some of Carole King’s songs were covered in a season six episode of ‘Glee’. 

When it came to creating the musical ‘Beautiful’, Carole King was initially a bit reluctant about the idea of some aspects of her work and personal life being turned into a show. However, with encouragement from family and friends, she became involved in the development of the musical and found it to be quite a powerful, emotional experience. By all accounts, she’s a humble, modest person but she’s accomplished a lot and has so much to be proud of as she started writing songs in her teens and ‘Tapestry’ came out before she was thirty. Now almost eighty, King famously performed in London’s Hyde Park as recently as 2016. 

It’s a bit of a shorter post this time but thank you for reading. The songs on ‘Tapestry’ truly are catchy, thought-provoking and wonderful. I also love the messages about the power of friendship, being who you truly are and voicing how you feel. Another strong message of the show concerns noticing the beauty all around you and sometimes even picking up on the beauty in yourself that everyone else sees (but you may not). This is such an important theme for all generations (I’m a Gen Z, apparently, what are you?) and particularly for anyone, like me, who has a health condition or other reason to feel insecure. As the titular song says ‘you’re beautiful as you feel.’ It can be hard to feel beautiful or 'enough' at times (I probably know this as much as anyone) but everyone has so much talent, beauty and worth.