Beautiful - The Carole King Musical

Before releasing her first album, Tapestry, Carole King was a succesful composer, working with her then husband Gerry Coffin as part of the famous Hit Factory in New York. This musical covers much of that period, a fabulously creative era for pop music and a real time of change. Molly Grace-Cutler's Carole is genuinely convincing,  she has the songs and the style off to a tee and bounces well off Tom Milner's Gerry Goffin. Their competitive relationship with Barry Mann (Jos Slovick) and Cynthia Weil (Seren Sandham-Davies) comes over well and these four performances really carry the show forward well supported by Garry RObson as Donnie and Claire Greenway as Genie.

The ensemble cast work extremely hard though I didn't find some of the  group performances, such as The Drifters, convincing there was still no doubting the talent on stage. It is, apparently, no longer sufficient to be a "triple threat" on stage, you have to be a "triple threat and multi-instrumentalist" as the music is played live by the cast.

Staging is simple and effective and the whole evening a real delight - especially for those of us old enough to remember all tehse songs in their original releases - so many happy memories!

Give yourself a treat and go and see it ...