The creators of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical expected the woman of their inspiration to show up at the Curran Theatre for its 2013 world premiere prior to Broadway. But she was a no-show. Certainly, they thought, she'll be at the New York opening. And again, no Carole.
The singer-songwriter wasn't keen at seeing her life, and most dramatically, her failed marriage to songwriting partner Gerry Goffin, put on display as a Broadway musical. Doug McGrath, whose job it was to create a biographical script on which King's songs could be hung, empathized with the reluctant Broadway debutante for shying away from what became a big hit and is now making its first return to San Francisco, arriving Aug. 9 at the Orpheum Theatre.
"It wouldn't be my idea of entertainment to see dark chapters of my life put up in front of me for the entertainment of other people," said McGrath, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who made his own Broadway debut with his book for Beautiful. "But she had another reason as well. She was afraid that if she came to see it, it would be like, oh my God, Carole King is in the house, and they're going to turn to clap toward her every time there's a song, or to see if she's crying when something terrible is happening to her in the show."
McGrath was at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York when, four months into the run, King finally succumbed to entreaties from friends and fans that she should see the show. He had been alerted that she would be at a particular performance, but he had no idea where she was sitting because she came in a disguise that included a wig over her famously long curly tresses. No one in the cast or the audience knew she was there.
"The curtain call is almost over, and then out she comes," McGrath recalled. "I can't tell you how electrifying it was, and yet how slow it was, because she walks out and the cast and the audience on that side of the stage realize that it's her and they start to gasp, and then it's like a wand as she goes across the stage as everything builds until she's center stage and Jessie Mueller, who was playing Carole, is in tears. Carole couldn't get a word out for two minutes."
Someone in the audience then shouted, "Sing something," and since the cast was raising money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS at this performance, she said she would sing if someone offered a big enough donation. When three people each pledged $10,000, that got King to sing. "And the song she sang," McGrath said, "was that old bugaboo of mine, 'You've Got a Friend.'"
How to work this song into the show was one of the challenges that arose during the musical's pre-Broadway run in San Francisco. It was not being used at all in the show when performances began here, and audiences noticed. "We were always at the back of the theater with our pads," McGrath said of his collaborators and himself, "and people would figure out we had something to do with the show. And every night someone would float up to me and say, 'Why isn't "You've Got a Friend" in the show?' So we tried putting in in twice, and both times the placement of the song was so bad we had to take it back out that very night. I had to write a whole separate scene to make it work."
What they learned in San Francisco was that audiences wanted a context for the songs, not just arriving like a hit parade. "The songs all have to come out of these people and their stories and their struggles," McGrath said. "The other song that gave us trouble, funnily enough, was 'Natural Woman.' The audience just didn't want to hear the song just by itself, so I wrote a scene in the recording studio where she's hesitant to sing it because Gerry wrote the lyrics and she's trying to move past that part of her life."
In addition to focusing on King and Goffin's marriage and career, which began when both were still Brooklyn teens during the late 1950s, the musical was also able to pull from the bountiful song catalog of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, with whom King and Goffin shared adjoining offices at 1650 Broadway. The couples became friendly rivals, watching as their songs vied for positions on the record charts. The musical alternates between such early Goffin-King compositions as "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion" and "Up on the Roof," and such Mann-Weil songs as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," "On Broadway" and "Walking in the Rain."
McGrath interviewed the four songwriters at length, almost as if he were writing biographies on each. "I said right away, 'I don't want to do the Mamma Mia version where we take the songs and put them in a fictional story.' Carole placed no preconditions other than that Cynthia and Barry be characters in the story." But he didn't know where the story should stop, and King's becoming a recording star in her own right with the seminal 1971 album Tapestry wasn't even in the first incarnations of the script. That was another case where audience expectations had to be honored.
Many of the songs begin in the songwriters' humble studios before the set breaks open and we see replications of the original artists performing the songs in full costume and choreography in concerts, nightclubs, and on television. McGrath's background is in movies, having written the scripts for and directed such films as Emma, Infamous, and Nicholas Nickleby, and earned an Oscar nomination for co-authoring Bullets Over Broadway with Woody Allen.
"The cinematic quality was always in my script, but I had no idea how it would actually work on stage. But director Marc Bruni was excited by the transitions, and with set designer Derek McLane, they worked it out in those sweeping ways." McGrath is now set to write the screenplay for a movie adaptation that Sony Pictures hopes to start next year, but he said the project is moving at a "glacial" pace.
Jessie Mueller won a Tony Award for her performance as Carole King on Broadway, and her sister Abby Mueller is heading the cast of the touring company. It might seem like a bit of gimmick casting, and McGrath and his collaborators knew the dangers of that perception and had to convince themselves that Abby deserved the role in her own right.
"For the show to work as more than a nostalgic experience, you have to have an actress who can make a fully nuanced emotional commitment, because the part is very carefully written to mine a lot of unspoken vulnerabilities," McGrath said. "I can confidently say that Abby has all those skills and more. And I'll tell you one more thing, she sings 'Natural Woman' in a way that I think is the defining performance of that song of all the people who have played the part so far. If you disagree, you can call and yell at me later."
Beautiful will run Aug. 9-Sept. 18 at the Orpheum Theatre. Tickets are $45-$212. Call (888) 746-1799 or go to shnsf.com.