Who would’ve thought that a biography of the life of a composer/lyricist would be interesting to watch? This musical, choreographed by John Prince, directed by Mac Bruni, and based off of the book by Douglas McGrath, has definitely caught the attention of many an audience. It first premiered on October 3, 2013 in San Francisco, California and has, thankfully, made its way to the small city of Rochester, New York.

“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” is a jukebox musical which means it is a musical that uses previously released popular songs as its musical score. The most interesting part about this is all of the songs used in the musical have all been written by the ever famous Carole King. Many of these songs include, “Some kind of wonderful,” “You’ve got a friend,” and “You make me feel like a natural woman.”

This musical is about the early life and career of Carole King, starting from her life at age 16 and ending, on the stage, at the age of 28. The musical begins with Carole sitting at a piano, on stage, talking to us as if we are the audience in the musical, breaking the fourth wall. A few minutes later, the scene changes completely to a 16-year-old Carole sitting in her apartment with her mom, writing a song. Thus, the musical takes us, the audience, through her life, as she gets pregnant at 16, marries a 20-year-old boy, and begins composing music for the lyrics that her husband, Gerry, has written.

The songs that Carole writes are performed by famous singers such as The Righteous Brothers and The Drifters. Later in her life, Carole becomes extremely successful and moves into the suburbs with Gerry and has another child. She becomes extremely close with two other famous songwriters, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. However, she soon finds out that Gerry is cheating on her so she packs up her stuff, leaves him, and moves to Los Angeles, California to produce more songs. This time, however, Carole chooses to sing the songs herself instead of letting somebody else do it for her. The musical wraps right back around to the beginning where it ends with Carole coming on stage, to the piano, and singing a song to us as she did in the beginning of the musical. I believe this was a very clever way of ending the musical because the producer very cleverly brought us back into the present.

There are so many wonderful things that happened during this musical to make it one of the best I’ve ever seen. I want to begin by describing the stage since this is the first thing the audience sees when the lights turn on. The backgrounds were beautiful and the different colors that the lights turned to set each and every mood were amazing. A huge part of this musical that I’ve never seen before was the moving floor. I would never see any of the tech crew coming in-between scene changes and taking any of the furniture out of the scene. The furniture would move completely on its own off of the stage, and this made a very interesting and fast scene change. I also noticed that there was only one piano, apart from the big grand piano at the end of the musical, that was almost always on stage. This definitely brought the theme of the musical to life, especially since it was the same piano that Carole started playing when she was 16.

There were a lot of components that this production used that are similar to the ones used in prior musicals, such as “Showboat.” Like “Showboat,” there is a fierce, female lead whose husband leaves her and she has to make a living on her own. To keep in mind, this musical is set in the 1940s and “Showboat” premiered in 1927. Also, racism during this time is still an issue, especially since a group of black performers refused to sing a song Carole wrote because it sounded too “white.” The spectacular costumes marked a wondrous change in fashion as Carole could only wear dresses or skirts when she was young, and then once she moved to L.A. she is wearing jeans and a loose blouse.

In all, this musical is extraordinary and I recommend it to anyone who is in the mood for some older music and a lot of fun!