Having enjoyed great acclaim during its debut Midlands run late last year, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical makes a welcome return to the region. What’s On recently caught up with leading lady Bronté Barbé to find out more....  

 After kicking off its first ever UK tour late last year, Broadway and West End smash hit Beautiful: The Carole King Musical enjoyed a warmly received run at Birmingham Hippodrome in November. But even If It’s Over and you missed out, don’t think that It’s Too Late. Though touring may have taken the show Way Over Yonder and So Far Away, it turns out pretty soon it’s Goin’ Back – on Wednesday 31 January to be precise. It seems something told Birmingham Hippodrome it was into something good…

“It sold really well, and the theatre is so supportive of the work that arrives there,” says Bronté Barbé, who takes over the tremendous task of playing Carole King from Cassidy Janson. “They laid on a lovely welcome for us, and we had a really good time in Birmingham. The audiences were fantastic!”

Telling the extraordinary story of the songwriter-turned-performer’s rise to fame, the show takes us through King’s personal trials and tribulations: overcoming her own insecurities, kicking back against convention, and breaking into what was, in the 1960s, still a very male-dominated music industry.

“One of the first lines in the show is Carole’s mum saying to her, ‘Girls don’t write music, they teach it,’” says Barbé. “She was so brave at that time, to go into those offices to present her songs. What’s amazing is that despite her insecurities, she had the determination to stick at it and get what she wanted, especially when she was so young.”

Evidently, this Sweet Young Thing Wasn’t Born to Follow: of course we know that she eventually stepped into the limelight and became a star in her own right with the international sensation that was Tapestry. But with her relationship with her husband and long-term writing partner Gerry Goffin breaking down during the twelve-year period the show covers, there’s plenty of heartache and Crying in the Rain before we get to the feel-good finale.

“I think [Carole] actually found it very hard to listen to the initial read-throughs of the show, because in a way it was like living through it again. But then I know she later went to the Broadway show in disguise and absolutely loved it. She even ended up getting on stage to sing with the cast!

“It is a very different process playing a part like this. Because she’s a real person, she’s still alive and she worked so hard for this, you do want to honour her. I haven’t met her and I don’t know if I will – though I’d absolutely love to! But I have watched lots of interviews and documentaries and videos of her, and I’ve read her book. So hopefully I’m living up to the task!”

The trick, you might say, is not to play her as your typical, emotionally demonstrative musical theatre type character, but rather to make her feel like a Natural Woman – or even become one over the course of the show, since she’s still a wide-eyed teenager when it begins.

“Mainly it’s about physicality, because obviously you hold yourself in such a different way as an adolescent growing up, so I think that was the main thing for me, though I’m also aided by different wigs and different costumes. It was definitely a challenge, but it’s so satisfying to play a character who is developing in front of your eyes.”

Paradoxically, however, making things appear convincingly natural and spontaneous actually takes an awful lot of hard work and meticulous attention to detail, particularly when it comes to the vocals. With big fans of Carole King coming in to theatres expecting to Feel the Earth Move, getting the singing right was always Going to Take Some Time…

“It was quite a long process because I wanted to get as close to Carole as I could without doing an impression, because that’s not what it’s about. So I listened to her intently for a long time, broke down what I thought where ‘Carole-isms’, as we call them, then wrote them out, put them in different places, and sang the songs over and over again with and without them. In the Broadway production, they also had their own Carole-isms that they added, so I took on some of those and added in some of my own as well. But it’s been really fun because the musical director, Patrick Hurley, has been amazing, and whenever I’ve made suggestions, everyone’s always been up for trying them rather than this just being a carbon copy of what’s been done before.”

While this is not an actor-musician show, Barbé has also had to learn enough of the instrumentation to at least look as though she’s really playing a piano on stage.

“We have three pianos that move around on pallets but all of the music had to be separate because it would just be impossible to keep them in tune all the time and make sure they could be heard properly. So what I’ve done is worked very closely with Patrick to learn how to play the piano exactly like he does, only on a piano that makes no noise. Which is quite a task, but we’re so in tune now that somehow it just works!”

For Barbé, as for many audience members, seeing the show for the first time in London was a real eye-opener. Despite considering herself a fan, it wasn’t until she went to see some friends performing in the West End show that she realised quite how prolific a songwriter King was.

“I had her album Tapestry on vinyl because my mum told me I had to get it when I first got a record player, and I just absolutely loved it. I probably overplayed it, actually. So I already thought she was fantastic, but I had no idea she’d written all of these other songs I knew like “The Locomotion and ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’. There’s a huge back catalogue of songs in the show.”

It’s partly this that helps Beautiful to stand out from the slew of similar biopic-style jukebox musicals flooding theatres across the country at the moment: seeing her at work creating songs for high-profile artists both provides an opportunity for other characters and actors to perform her songs, and allows us to meet and hear the music of some of the other big names in the business.

“There’s no other show that I know of where one character can present a song and then a whole other group of characters can sing the same song without you getting bored of it. Like with ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’, I present it and then The Shirelles sing it in a completely different way. The combination of that and the fact that it isn’t just about her and Gerry Goffin but also the other writing duo Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann means there’s a great variety of music in the show.”

For those of an age to remember when King first made it big, the music and nostalgia it inspires will surely be the main draw, with many coming just to hear that one special Song of Long Ago. Yet there’s more to it than that. Beautiful aims to be a show not just for one generation, but for Anyone At All, Some Kind of Wonderful that’s guaranteed to have you Dancing with Tears in your Eyes.

“The songs might be the main focus by the script is just as strong. It’s very well-constructed so that one doesn’t outweigh the other. There’s so much heart to the piece and it’s so incredibly relatable that I think there’s something for everyone. It’s an amazing night! It’s like a rock concert at the end – there’s no other feeling like it. For me, it’s almost like an out-of-body experience. It’s so incredibly uplifting and fast-paced, and it just takes you on a journey that doesn’t stop.”

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical returns to Birmingham Hippodrome from Wed 31 January to Sat 3 February. 

The show then plays at Regent Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, from Tues 24 to Sat 28 April and Wolverhampton Grand Theatre from Tues 12 to Sat 16 June.