‘Beautiful’ musical follows Carole King’s rise from teen with a dream to star

Carole King’s spirit has been part of The Smith Center since March 2012, when she played the opening “From Dust to Dreams” gala.

Happily, her music is back, courtesy of “Beautiful — the Carole King Musical,” which continues in Reynolds Hall through Oct. 2.

“Beautiful’s” creators may downplay its status as a jukebox musical built around existing songs, but the show is exactly that, thanks to a greatest-hits score that lights up the jukebox in the mind of every baby boomer in the audience.

Yet even non-boomers will groove to “Beautiful’s” can’t-stop-the-beat score and its inspiring, if conventional, account of how Brooklyn teen Carole Klein became top pop songwriter Carole King — in partnership with her lyricist husband Gerry Goffin — and then, after their painful split, soared even higher, finding her voice as a singer-songwriter superstar.

Like all records, “Beautiful” also has a flip side: the parallel lives of fellow songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, whose ’60s pop classics include “On Broadway” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the 20th century’s top jukebox song.

With its two-couple focus, “Beautiful” almost qualifies as a double-sided hit, as the flip-lipped Weil (sassy Erika Olson) and amusingly neurotic Mann (Ben Fankhouser) provide a comic counterpoint to the angst-ridden Goffin-King relationship.

When we first meet King (the endearingly earnest Julia Knitel), she’s sweet 16 and determined to become a pop songwriter.

“Girls don’t write music,” her kvetchy mother (wry Suzanne Grodner) reminds Carole, “they teach it.”

But “the man with the golden ear,” alias all-business music publisher Don Kirshner (on-target understudy Matt Faucher on the show’s first two nights; regular Curt Bouril returns for the rest of the run), knows a good song when he hears one. Besides, he reasons, “who better to write for kids” buying all those records “than kids?”

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King finds her other half, professionally and personally, in Queens College heartthrob Goffin (outwardly tough, inwardly touchy Liam Tobin), whose flair for creating evocative lyrics (“Up on the Roof,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”) is matched only by his restless quest to escape the partnership’s confinement.

Fueled by its powerhouse numbers (and director Marc Bruni’s brisk pacing), “Beautiful” generates enough energy and emotion to overcome the repetitive and-then-we-wrote nature of Douglas McGrath’s book, which frequently attempts to draw parallels between the songs and the lives of the people writing them.

Sometimes those songs (“One Fine Day,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) are up to the heavy narrative lifting, giving “Beautiful” some welcome depth. Not nearly often enough to lift it into the realm of the truly insightful, but often enough to lift our spirits above the old routine.

Like the pop songs that power its narrative, “Beautiful — the Carole King Musical” follows a formula. But it’s a formula with both a beat — and a heartbeat. And that turns out to be a combination you can’t beat. (Or resist.)

Read more stories from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.