Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Douglas McGrath, directed by Marc Bruni
David Mirvish, Ed Mirvish Theatre, Toronto
July 5-September 3, 2017
“Some Kind of Wonderful”
Chilina Kennedy is fantastic. That’s all you need to know about Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. In terms of her singing and acting she gives the warmest, most deeply engaging performance of anyone in a musical in Toronto in a decade. Kennedy believably plays King as a 16-year-old in 1958 who sells her first song and gradually ages her character until King’s famous concert at Carnegie Hall in 1971, which provides the frame for the musical.
Kennedy has always had a rich, expressive voice as seen when she played the title role in Evita at Stratford in 2010 and Mary Magdalene there in Jesus Christ Superstar in 2011. If anything it has gained in those qualities and Kennedy is able to colour it to suit King’s age when she sings. By the time of King’s Tapestry album of 1971, Kennedy has shaded her voice so that it actually sounds like King’s on the record. Like King, Kennedy provides her own accompaniment on the piano. Her acting is so completely natural and fresh it’s hard to believe she has been playing the role on Broadway since March 7, 2015. You leave as impressed by the depth and sympathy she brings to the role as by her seemingly boundless energy.
If the show were some sort of competition, Kennedy’s star-making performance would cast all around her in shadow. Luckily, Beautiful is not that kind of musical. Kennedy’s Carole King is naturally the centre of the show, but director Marc Bruni has managed to have the members of the supporting cast lend focus to Kennedy and yet maintain their own distinct identities.
Chief among these is Liam Tobin, who plays Gerry Goffin, King’s husband and lyricist, whom she married when she was only 17 and already pregnant by him. Tobin was hired to play Goffin for the North American tour of Beautiful, but people in southern Ontario will already have seen his great talent on stage in shows for Drayton Entertainment and as Buddy in Elf as the Grand Theatre in 2013 and as Lord Farquaad in Shrek The Musical there in 2014. Those shows revealed his natural charisma, fine singing voice and gift for comedy. Beautiful shows that Tobin is equally adept at serious drama. Tobin carefully depicts how Goffin’s occasional outbursts of dissatisfaction with himself frighteningly change from mere expressions of temper to signs of clinical depression. His singing voice is stronger than ever and he delivers such songs as “Up on the Roof” with passion.
The parallel couple and rivals to the King-Goffin songwriting team are composer Barry Mann (Ben Frankhauser) and lyricist Cynthia Weil (Erika Olson). Olson has the strongest voice of the two and her character’s perky, no-nonsense personality contrasts well with the Barry’s hypochondria. The presence of this couple not only gives Kennedy and Tobin a chance to rest their voices but points out how rich songwriting was in this period. Mann and Weil had their own share of hits that include “On Broadway” (1963), “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” (1964) and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (1965).
Other standouts are Suzanne Grodner as King’s stereotypical Jewish mother and James Clow as Don Kirschner who ran 1650 Broadway, the songwriting factory where King, Goffin, Mann and Weill got their star. During the evening we see ensemble members take on the roles of some groups that King and Mann wrote for. These include The Drifters, The Shirelles, Janelle Woods, Little Eva and The Righteous Brothers. Vocally all of the performers give outstanding performances exactly in the style of these various acts. But beside that, choreographer Josh Prince has clearly studied the various styles of synchronized dancing of these groups and the performers execute them so immaculately you can’t avoid smiling at a time when singing rock songs demanded a look of elegance and sophistication.
If the show has a flaw it is that can sometimes feel like a tribute act hit parade of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Douglas McGrath’s book races rather perfunctorily through King’s life in Act 1 with the dialogue seeming to exist simply to set up the time, place and romantic status of the two couples. McGrath does devote more time to developing his characters in Act 2, but he does leave out information inconvenient to his story.
His through-line is that Carole King is married to her lyricist husband in more ways than one. Together they write songs for other people to sing, but King comes to the realization that she has ideas that Goffin does not and that she needs to write her own songs and needs to sing them herself. McGrath omits the fact that King’s first solo album Writer was a failure and that she had remarried in 1970, the year before she wrote Tapestry. Both facts would disrupt the straight line from self-realization to independence and success that McGrath wants to depict.
Nevertheless, Beautiful gives us an intelligent glimpse into a period of great change in popular music. Don Kirschner’s song factory may have succeeded in churning out nonsensical dance tunes for teenagers in the 1950s and early ‘60s, but Carole King represents the rise of the singer-songwriter who would write songs to communicate personal experience or of others who would demand social change. Placing Carole King in context helps to give Beautiful greater depth than other compilation musicals.
Above all, Chilina Kennedy’s performance as Carole King is unmissable. After the run of Beautiful in Toronto, Kennedy returns to New York to take up the role again there. Kennedy radiates such love for her home audience, you owe it to yourself to celebrate her triumphant return to Canada.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Chilina Kennedy as Carole King; Erika Olson as Cynthia Weil, Chilina Kennedy as Carole King, Ben Frankhauser as Barry Mann and Liam Tobin as Gerry Goffin. ©2017 Joan Marcus.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2017-07-06
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical