At one point in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” the 16-year-old version of Carole King heads with a friend to 1650 Broadway in New York, hoping to sell one of her numbers. “It’s like a factory,” she tells her worried Brooklyn mother, “only they make songs.
Watching “Beautiful” for the fourth time , I was reminded how well bookwriter Douglas McGrath hit all the affectionate notes you have to hit for the core audience of King fans, but did so with the kind of wit and verve that none of the biographical jukes that have followed quite managed. Part of the secret sauce here is the size of the ensemble, and the show’s emphasis on all the Black artists who recorded the justly famed songs of King and Goffin and Weil and Mann.
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