The company of the Tony-winning musical Beautiful: The Carole King Musical made the earth under Central Park’s SummerStage move to the rhythm of the show’s most memorable tunes. Hosted by Hoda Kotb, the one night only event featured a selection of the musical’s numbers performed concert style, with Kotb adding historical details (i.e. the plot of the show) in between to help audiences make sense of the background behind the music’s creation. Similarly to Douglas McGrath’s book, the concert followed King’s ascent from pop songwriter to singer songwriter chronologically, with the songs divided into “blocks” related to King’s career.
The first block featured hits King wrote with Gerry Goffin like “Some Kind of Wonderful”, “The Locomotion” and “One Fine Day” (which was sung without the punch-in-the-gut coda of the musical), another block dedicated to Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann included “On Broadway” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”. Those upbeat sections were followed by a slightly darker part in which Kotb explained “the songwriters had been influenced by the war in Vietnam” and couldn’t help but deliver songs such as “Chains” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”.
If anything, watching Beautiful: The Carole King Musical in a concert setting helped to best understand just how groundbreaking King’s eventual success really was. For most of the concert we only got glimpses of King (portrayed by Chilina Kennedy) and the attention was focused on the people performing the songs she wrote for them. The very last part of the show then was dedicated to King’s Tapestry era, which saw her deliver “It’s Too Late”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and the title song, and Kennedy of course, hit it out of the park. Pun intended.
What was refreshing about seeing the show with almost four thousand people, was to see how King’s music has touched so many different generations; mothers, daughters, grandmothers, heck even sons and fathers all felt like “natural women” and sang along with Kennedy and the phenomenal ensemble. It was a night to remind us all about how art truly brings us together, for probably nothing else this summer will come close to creating a sense of pure community, like it was to sing along and dance with strangers who were all smiles and cheers. It was a great night for Broadway (imagine all the people who will buy tickets wanting to experience the full show!), it was a great night for music and it was a great night for New York City.
