A ‘Beautiful’ night: Carole King musical rocks the INB with great tunes

There are albums that take us back in time, that serve as the soundtrack to a portion of our lives. For me, the album of my childhood was “Tapestry” – an eight-track copy of Carole King’s Grammy-winning hit had a near-permanent spot in our family car for a lot of the 1970s.

It’s an album that is soaring and sad, and perfectly encapsulates a place in time. So it seems natural that such songs would find a home in a jukebox musical. Luckily for us, King’s artistic output was much deeper than the 12 tracks on “Tapestry.” With her former husband Gerry Goffin, King wrote a string of hits for groups like the Drifters, the Shirelles and Little Eva.

“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” puts all of these great songs on stage in a show that is music-heavy and lively. The show, running this weekend at the INB Performing Arts Center as part of the Best of Broadway series, briskly covers King’s rise from teenage songwriter in Brooklyn, through her troubled marriage to Goffin, her friendship with fellow songwriters Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, her move to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles to her triumphant return to New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1971.

We first meet King in her home in Brooklyn, where she convinces her mother to let her go to Times Square and try to sell a song to music producer and publisher Don Kirshner. He buys it, and the song is a minor hit. Then she meets Goffin in college. He dreams of being a playwright, but the two team up and start writing songs together – she writes the music, he writes the words. After the Shirelles take their song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” to No. 1 in 1960, the two are on a roll, racking up hit after hit with “Up on the Roof,” “Take Good Care of My Baby,” “The Loco-Motion,” “One Fine Day.”

Also working with Kirshner are Weil and Mann, who become friends and competitors with King and Goffin. Weil and Mann scored hits with “On Broadway,” “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”

Julia Knitel is delightful as King. She does a great job of encapsulating King’s youth, energy and insecurity. She’s reluctant to sing her own songs because she doesn’t see herself as beautiful. At one point, she quips, “I have the right amount of body, it’s just not organized properly.” When a session musician suggests she join his band for a set at a local club, she declines, saying she’s too “normal” looking to sing in public, and, “Who wants to hear a normal person sing?” That Knitel is a knockout singer is a bonus.

As Goffin, Liam Tobin does a nice job of presenting an insecure man. A failed playwright, Goffin in “Beautiful” is never really satisfied with the constraints of the three-minute pop song.

Weil and Mann, played by Erika Olson and Ben Fankhauser, serve both as sounding board to King and Goffin and as comic relief. Both actors have an easy rapport and are adept at one-liners – Mann is portrayed as hypochondriac, while his future wife is sassy and whip-smart.

Technically, the show is a lot of fun. The costume changes especially are deftly handled, with more than one that feels pretty flashy. The sets are relatively simple but effective and the between-scene transitions seamless.

The show does get a bit dark toward the mid-section, as the King-Goffin marriage struggles with the weight of Goffin’s mental health issues and infidelity. Mostly though, “Beautiful” is an upbeat story of one plucky and talented young woman on her bumpy road to success. Of course, the story is briskly told, and necessarily condenses a lot of King’s story. But that’s OK. Because if there’s one time to let great music tell a story, it’s when the songs are written by Carole King.