Review: It's One Fine Day with BEAUTIFUL on Tour

Musical theatre fans, particularly those of a certain age, love to discuss the fabled merits of Funny Girl, the musical that launched the career of legendary entertainer Barbra Streisand. Because of the young singer-actress's galvanizing performance, the show's weaknesses, namely that the score was uneven and the book frankly not very good, were overlooked. Nonetheless, the story's bio-musical plot about a young Jewish performer with ample talent but unconventional looks found an echo years later in another bio-musical. Fanny Brice of Funny Girl now becomes Carole King of Beautiful, and while there may not be a song as thrilling and iconic as "Don't Rain on My Parade" in this newer show, Beautiful has one more important thing going for it- a book that works, and supporting characters you care about.

Taking cues not only from other bio-musicals (particularly Motown) and biopics, but from modern TV classic Mad Men, the show follows the first decade in the career of naïve, almost square songwriter Carole King (Abby Mueller), whose songwriting and demo recording work at the Brill Building songwriting lab, the last gasp of Tin Pan Alley in New York City, brings her to a tumultuous relationship with emotionally unstable songwriter Gerry Goffin (Liam Tobin), and a sometimes-friendship, sometimes-rivalry with fellow songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (Ben Fankhauser and Becky Gulsvig, respectively). The two nascent songwriting teams, Goffin-King and Mann-Weil, both develop a talent for writing sophisticated music that appeals to black and white audiences alike, and they spend the first half of the Sixties affably competing as they churn out hit after hit. But as the era of easy drugs and free love rolls around, cracks appear in the already fragile relationship between old-fashioned Carole and restless Gerry. Both are destined for greatness, as any music buff knows, but pretty much everyone can tell you which of the four friends becomes a superstar singer-songwriter. After all, it's in the title.

In the titular role, Abby Mueller is charming and winsome, bringing to mind a sane version of Lorna Morello from Orange Is the New Black. Her singing voice begins quiet and almost mousy but grows from there, allowing her to develop over the course of the show's decade into a genuine performer and interpreter of her own work. Her counterpart Liam Tobin artfully displays the opposite- his performance begins with charisma and vitality to spare, but trickles out and dwindles away as his demons whittle away at his stability. Librettist Douglas McGrath makes the wise decision to depict Goffin as a bad husband, but not necessarily a bad man, showing him skirting the line towards emotional abuse but never making a definitive move that would make the story seem too black and white.

Monogamous Carole and philandering Gerry are balanced by Becky Gulsvig and Ben Fankhauser as commitment-phobic Cynthia and marriage-minded Barry. Fankhauser's Barry is the most endearing character in the show for his balance of stock characteristics and genuine humanity. Sure, he's a nerdy, hypochondriac Jewish guy, like almost every young male character actor supporting role, but he's also a hugely successful womanizer and gifted musician with a heart of gold. Fankhauser's ironic, detached performances of the songs he writes in Act 1 gradually grow into a more soulful, unexpected performance when he finally writes a genuine, honest-to-god rock tune in Act 2. (While the central quartet play songwriters, most of the songs they "perform" are in demo-style rough drafts, which then blossom into full-band arrangements performed by the ensemble as the artists who famously debuted the songs). The one performer who comes closest to stealing the show is Becky Gulsvig as Cynthia. From her beginnings as a wildly ambitious cabaret songwriter to her success as a writer of clever, classy pop standards, Gulsvig roots the character in a mixture of steeliness and sheepish vulnerability. It's the sort of role Kristin Chenoweth or Christine Ebersole would have been salivating over in decades past, and Gulsvig knocks it out of the park with superb, sharp comic timing and real heart peeking through around the corners of her persona.

Jukebox musical naysayers (do we still have those? I assume we do) can rest easy- not only is Beautiful a smart, well-written show that uses its songs well, it also counts as more of a play with music, albeit lots of music, than a conventional musical. Only once in the entire show does a character sing a non-diegetic song simply to express their emotions, and this is in the middle of a diegetic performance of the same song. But don't let purism sway you away from the form. After all, the first musicals were jukebox musicals, all the way back to John Gay's Beggar's Opera over three hundred years ago. And let's be real- if all jukebox musicals were as good as this one, there would be no complaints.

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