The Hobby Center welcomed the national tour of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical to Houston for a limited 3-day run this weekend, treating audiences to all of their favorite Carole King songs (and more) while telling the story of the famed singer’s rise to fame. As someone who came to the show with familiarity of her work, I still learned many things about King’s life and heard songs I never knew were written by her.
The plot starts with the sixteen-year-old King selling her first hit song to a producer in New York and follows her career all the way to the recording of her first solo album. Carole King spent the first portion of her career co-writing songs with her boyfriend-turned-husband for a record label that gave the tracks to other artists and groups to perform (such as the Drifters) and competing with Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, their best friends and writing duo next door. The show did a great job showing the parallels and competition between her career and Cynthia/Barry’s through a timeline of all of their hit songs. Audience members could be seen dancing in their seats throughout the performance (and some were even heard humming along). The scenes were filled with lots of comedy alongside sincere anguish and tension among the characters. The actors did a great job balancing the roller-coaster of emotions their characters experience while also appearing to genuinely have fun together on stage.
The staging and choreography used an open, flexible set, creating locations using furniture instead of scenery. Additionally, there were many seamless transitions between different times and places using consistent props or furniture pieces, such as a piano or couch, with the rest of the set transforming around the actors in real time. The choreography was excellent with its combination of real world scenes featuring King, her family, and her friends and performances by the Drifters, the Shirelles, and others to showcase the songs they had been writing.
Although Beautiful: The Carole King Musical had a very limited run in Houston this time around, I hope it comes back for a longer stay in the future, allowing more people to enjoy the crowd-pleasing show. However, if you did miss this production, Broadway at the Hobby Center still has three shows left in their 2021-2022 season, Disney’s Frozen, Mean Girls, and January’s rescheduled run of Tony Award-winning Hadestown. For more information about Broadway at the Hobby Center and their recently announced 2022-2023 season, please visit houston.broadway.com. For more Broadway updates, tune into my KTRU specialty show “Showstoppers” weekly on Sundays from 1:45 to 2:45 pm on air and online at ktru.org.