Like her 2012 memoir, A Natural Woman, this jukebox musical is bookended by Carole King putting on a concert. The show opens and closes at New York’s Carnegie Hall in the wake of her phenomenally successful 1971 album Tapestry and traces King’s journey into the spotlight as a solo artist, focusing on her songwriting partnership with her first husband, Gerry Goffin.
Nikolai Foster’s touring production is staged with his customary elan and finds Molly-Grace Cutler in fine voice as a quirky and compassionate King. But the musical – which won Tony awards in New York in 2014 and Olivier awards in London the following year – shortchanges the singer-songwriter both in her personal and professional lives, never fully capturing her character or how she blazed a trail, on her own terms, through the industry.
Douglas McGrath’s book begins by minimising King’s childhood – her younger brother, who was moved into a residence for disabled people, goes unmentioned while her father, a firefighter, is defined primarily as an adulterer. The story hurtles into her meeting with mogul Don Kirshner (portrayed as a jovial uncle by Garry Robson) and her teenage achievements seem breezy as she crafts pop songs at a time when, one medley reminds us, the charts were full of yakety-yak, stupid cupids and splish-splashing on a Saturday night.
On the other side of Goffin and King’s cubicle in Kirshner’s hit factory is another songwriting couple, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, and the show captures their friendly rivalry as both duos pull an all-nighter to write a new song for Kirshner’s approval.
Several songs are smartly used to reflect King’s changing circumstances: Some Kind of Wonderful marks the discovery that she’s pregnant and Up on the Roof alludes to Goffin’s turbulent childhood, though it could equally have mirrored King’s career-long search for private space in a noisy industry. Will You Love Me Tomorrow? comments not on the pair’s first night together but King’s fears of her husband’s infidelity; One Fine Day presents his eventual affair from both women’s perspective.
Foster’s production, which cuts the original’s overture, has an attractively loose feel. Songs are often first heard in embryo form, followed by polished performances from the groups who recorded them. Within a giant mosaic frame, Frankie Bradshaw’s set features studios and writing booths but these busy anonymous settings also accentuate the lack of quiet intimacy in the script. In her song Goodbye Don’t Mean I’m Gone, King wrote of holding a baby in one hand and a pen in the other; her family life is never as convincingly evoked here as her job. Too often the script favours a quick gag over emotional depth. Tom Milner captures Goffin’s unpredictability but the book glosses over the severity of his mental illness, which resulted in electroshock therapy.
Seren Sandham-Davies is a brassy Cynthia, even before picking up her trumpet, and Jos Slovick’s hypochondriacal Barry is humorous. Concentrating on their relationship means we hear Weil-Mann classics like You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (played here for laughs) but at the expense of developing King’s characterisation and her long career beyond the release of Tapestry. It is a stark contrast to Katori Hall’s masterfully lean chronology in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.
But Edd Lindley’s costumes are a delight (cloudy suits and eye-popping glitter jackets for the Drifters, fur-trimmed gowns for the Shirelles) and the multi-rolling support are strong. Give it up for Amena El-Kindy who, as King’s former babysitter Little Eva, performs The Loco-Motion on rollerskates and does it with ease.
At Curve, Leicester, until 12 March. Then touring.
