Carole King herself appeared at the curtain call on press night of this bio-musical, and with a single chorus of “You’ve Got A Friend” showed up the majority of the vocals in the preceding two and a half hours as overdone and inauthentic.
    
You know that momentary yodel when the voice briefly flukes up at the beginning or end of a note, which has somehow become accepted code for intense emotion in much contemporary pop singing? Director Marc Bruni’s cast know it, and use it liberally. The show’s version of Little Eva yodels, the Shirelles yodel (the Drifters yip rather than yodel), but all pale next to Katie Brayben as King herself. Brayben can get three or more yodels into a single line. It’s like hearing the Goffin/King songbook interpreted by Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman. And it pummels the songs themselves.
    
For these are great songs. Both those which King wrote with her husband Gerry Goffin and those of their best friends Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (of which several are included here) were the zenith of 1960s American pop before it became pop-rock and before solo singer-songwriters assumed dominance; then, after her break-up with Goffin, King moved to the forefront of the singer-songwriter wave as well, with her classic album Tapestry. Steve Sidwell’s arrangements of these numbers take few liberties, which is as it should be. Apart from those damned yodels.
    
The songs do all the heavy lifting, since – with all due respect – King’s life has not been the stuff of high drama. A bog-standard rocky marriage due to Goffin’s wandering loins and acid casualty, and that’s it. In some ways this is fortunate, as Douglas McGrath is frankly not up to writing a substantial book. “When I hear a good song… it’s like I got a friend in the room” and “Who’s that?” – “That’s Gerry Goffin” are typical of the level of insight. Everyone admires everyone else immensely apart from the single flaming marital row. The woman-finding-her-own-voice theme, hardly original in itself, is given a marshmallow, fluffy-sentimental treatment. I did feel the earth move under my feet, but I’m pretty sure it was just the Piccadilly Line running below.
    
Written for the Financial Times.