BWW Reviews: BEAUTIFUL - THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL, Aldwych Theatre, February 25 2015

Intimidated by the acreage of slots in a Las Vegas casino, I made for something familiar - a machine themed on The Monkees. It soon paid out $130 and played me "Pleasant Valley Sunday", one of my favourites - a win-win if ever there was one! That catchy number, and so many other songs that I and my contemporaries feel we were born knowing, was written by Carole King, who was writing teenage symphonies in New York at the same time Brian Wilson was doing the same in LA. One takeaway from Beautiful - The Carole King Musical (continuing at the Aldwych Theatre) is that she belongs in the same rarified songwriting company as Wilson, Lennon and McCartney.

The show is, of course, a jukebox musical, if a deluxe jukebox musical, and inevitably likely to displease some critics who seem happy to garland actors in biopics with more awards than they can fit on their mantelpiece, but consider such shows as this but a notch or two above karaoke. Not me! I love the strengths of the format and I accept the weaknesses: so, once you do that (as is the case with panto) what fun you can have!

Tumbling one on top of another come "Take Good Care Of My Baby", "Chains", "It Might As Well Rain Until September", the sublime "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and one or two compositions by King's friends and rivals, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil: "On Broadway" and a spinetingling "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling". If Douglas McGrath's re-telling of her life fails to get to the bottom of Carole King's complex personality and if husband/lyricist Gerry Goffin is painted rather crudely as a bastard with bipolar, the audience are not expecting to leave with a penetrating psychoanalytical portrait occupying their thoughts. They expect to leave humming "It's Too Late" - and they do!

Loading so much of the show on to the songs makes enormous demands on the performers, who must make us believe in their characters despite the limitations of the script, and deliver concert-standard versions of classics that we can hear in our own heads. There's a couple of excellent setpieces: an affectionately camp "Up On The Roof" by "The Drifters" and a spectacular "The Locomotion" from Little Eva (Lucy St. Louis). There's excellent support from the company too, who show plenty of comic timing to go with their vocal excellence.

What elevates to the show to something more than a Greatest Hits gig is a magnificent performance from Katie Brayben as Carole King. She looks and sounds like our heroine, and she carries all the emotional baggage that surges into the songs. King is an ordinary girl with ordinary dreams but she possesses an extraordinary talent in extraordinary times - Brayben shows us that tension, never more so than in a cathartic "(You Make Me Feel) Like A Natural Woman". The tickets are not cheap, but worth every penny for Brayben alone.

Is there a more entertaining evening in the West End just now? I'd be very surprised if there were.

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