Beautiful: The Carole King Musical

Leicester Curve                                            Touring until Nov 26, 2hrs 20mins

Rating:

Nora: A Doll's House

Royal Exchange, Manchester                                    Until Apr 2, 2hrs 30mins

Rating:

Two regional revivals offer the chance to see a pair of London hits in new iterations. Beautiful: The Carole King Musical skips through King’s upbringing in Brooklyn, her relationship with her songwriting partner and husband Gerry Goffin, their marital strife and her reinvention as a solo artist.

It’s easy to forget just how many solid-gold hits King penned, and the score is an embarrassment of riches, from Will You Love Me Tomorrow? to You’ve Got A Friend to (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

Much of the show is set in a New York hit factory, where we watch King and Goffin trying to craft the next big pop song before moving niftily into a finger-snapping performance by, say, The Shirelles or The Drifters. 

It’s all good fun, although I wished there’d been a little more on her solo work.

Beautiful has a star-making performance from Molly-Grace Cutler, who matches a goofy, girl-next-door appeal with an out-of-this-world voice.

Elsewhere, however, performances can remain two-dimensional, prioritising wisecracking over interiority, and I never quite bought the relationship with Tom Milner’s Goffin.

The main innovation of Nikolai Foster’s production is to cast actor-musicians, and set it in a studio, so that the show’s band is always on stage. It lends spontaneity, characters reaching for a guitar or trumpet as if riffing on King’s songs for the first time.

Stef Smith’s Nora is its own riff – expanding Ibsen’s classic, A Doll’s House. Here are three Noras, each smothered by patriarchy and domesticity, in 1918, 1968 and 2018. Their lives ripple over each other, and Smith’s cleverly constructed script is deftly staged in-the-round by Bryony Shanahan.

But staging three stories simultaneously means the issues Smith alludes to in each era – suffrage, homosexuality, debt, motherhood, domestic abuse – feel ticked off rather than fully explored. 

The three actors playing Nora must double as a visiting friend, while William Ash is husband to all. Shanahan’s direction usually makes this clear, but it is a very big ask.

Smith’s script includes chorus-like poetic interludes, binding the women together, but leading some performances into overly mannered delivery. Only Jodie McNee finds much intricacy as a pill-popping 1968 Nora.