"Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," opened Saturday at the Jay and Susie Gogue Performing Arts Center at Auburn University.
The audience was loud and bustling with excitement, as they took their seats for the sold-out show. The musical tells the true story of Carole King’s journey from a teenage songwriter to the award-winning, international superstar she is known as today.
The musical opened on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in January 2014 and continued to entertain audiences until it closed in 2019. Jessie Mueller, who played Carole King in the original production won a Tony award for her portrayal in 2014.
Additionally, the show was nominated for seven other Tony awards that same year, including “Best Musical,” “Best Book of a Musical,” “Best Orchestrations” and won “Best Sound Design,” as well. The show also won a Grammy award in 2015, for “Best Musical Theater Album.”
The show launched a U.S. tour in 2015 and performed two shows in Auburn on January 29 and 30.
The story begins at Carnegie Hall, where Carole King is performing after the success of her 1971 album, “Tapestry.” The audience is then taken back in time to 1958, where a 16-year-old Carole travels from Brooklyn to Manhattan to try and sell her new song to a music publisher, Donnie Kirshner.
Carole successfully sells her song and begins to write additional songs for Kirshner to send to other artists. While in college, King meets lyricist Gerry Goffin, and they begin a partnership that will span many years and the two will produce countless hit songs.
Together, they write “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Up on the Roof,” “On Broadway,” “The Loco-Motion” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” which is sold to The Shirelles and tops the charts for weeks.
While the performance shows their relationship as blissful, things take a turn when Goffin begins an affair with a singer the pair had been working with.
Eventually, King and Goffin divorce, and instead of finding a new partner, Carole King decides to take a chance on herself and write new songs on her own.
King approaches Donny Kirshner with her new album, full of personal songs written about her relationship and divorce with Goffin.
She tells Kirshner she believes she is the best person to sing these songs, as they are full of emotion and the pain of her former relationship. The album includes future hit songs: “You’ve Got a Friend,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Women” and “I Feel the Earth Move.”
Before her final performance of the show, Goffin visits one last time to apologize to King and tell her he predicts that she will go “all the way.”
The final scene of the musical takes the audience back to the beginning of the show where King is performing at Carnegie Hall in 1971, after winning several Grammys for her album, “Tapestry.”
As Carole King belts out the last song of the show, “Beautiful,” audience members bopped their heads and sang along to the emotional lyrics and impactful story they were taken on over the last two and a half hours.
The story of one woman’s journey through a devastating relationship to self-discovery, creating many hit songs along the way.
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Kara Mautz, senior in human development and family studies with a minor in journalism, is a culture writer at The Auburn Plainsman.
