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.