Beautiful - The Carole King Musical
New Theatre, Oxford
Until Saturday
IS Carole King well known enough to have a musical written about her? OK... It's Too Late, Take Good Care Of My Baby, One Fine Day, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Up On The Roof, The Locomotion, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, You've Got A Friend... Oh, and the album Tapestry.
Mix all that in with a story of hope, joy and heartbreak and you've got the perfect ingredients for a dazzling stage show.
Carole King is undoubtedly one of the great American songwriters and her songs are adored around the world. Beautiful tells her story, well... beautifully - from a song-obsessed Brooklyn teenager, through the productive years at the Brill Building song factory in the 1960s, to the triumph of Tapestry, the 1971 album that features on many people's Top Ten lists.
The show takes in her rocky romance with songwriting partner and husband Gerry Goffin, and the friendly rivalry with stablemates Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann.
And like King's songs, Beautiful makes you feel happy, sad, and ultimately exhilarated.
The person who is responsible for that is the one daring to take on the role of Carole King, and Bronte Barbe did that superbly. Her voice is astonishing and her performance captivating. She was belting out some of the most famous songs ever written with confidence and conviction.
She was well supported - Grant McConvey as Goffin gave us a conflicted character who flitted between nasty and nice, and Mann and Weil were played with charm by Matthew Gonsalves and Amy Ellen Richardson, the latter coming close to stealing the show.
This was a slick production, with fluid set changes, some fabulous costumes which yelled 1960s, and a lively ensemble who took on the likes of The Drifters and The Shirelles brilliantly.
Beautiful has earned rave reviews on Broadway and the West End since it opened in 2014, and audiences around the country are now loving it too. We certainly felt the Earth move in Oxford on Tuesday night.
STEPHEN WEBB
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