Anna Burnside reviews a production with 'charm and energy' as well as 'a compelling central performance.'
Not all large-scale musicals translate well to a smaller stage, as any parent who has sat through the school production of Grease will confirm. Pitlochry Festival Theatre, however, has a blueprint for scaling down a huge show, keeping its essence and charm without resorting to drastic cuts or backing tapes.
Beautiful is a musical theatre biography of Carole King, her husband Gerry Goffin and the parallel stories of their friends Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. There’s a lot of ground to cover - the shy but determined King’s early days in Brooklyn and the pair’s early days as hitmakers for other artists.
This is a good and a bad thing. The bangers keep coming, with the hugely talented cast reconfiguring themselves as everyone from the Drifters and the Righteous Brothers to Little Eva. But this means that the story is reduced to bullet points.
Kirsty Findlay’s outstanding performance as King fills in a lot of these gaps. She is utterly convincing as the Brooklyn firecracker, unsure of herself anywhere except when sitting down at a piano, belting out her own songs. Her body language and expressive face do much of the heavy lifting as she marries Goffin and has babies, all while populating the charts with songs that still sound great today.
The rest of the cast jump between instruments, vocals and multiple roles. Nina Kristofferson is a slinky force of nature fronting the Shirelles while Signe Larsson stalks around the stage playing a guitar. If only the equal opportunities casting of 2024 had been around when King was writing, her life would have been a lot easier.
Beautiful is such an expansive show that a few of the numbers don’t quite hit the mark and could have happily been cut. But it has enough charm and energy, and that compelling central performance, to carry it through.
Beautiful: The Carole King Story performs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in repertory until September 28, 2024. Check the website for specific dates and times.
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Photo by Fraser Band
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