With Mueller as singer-songwriter King, Epstein will play her husband and songwriting partner Gerry Goffin, with Larsen and Spector as their friends and fellow songwriters Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. The company also includes Jeb Brown as music publisher and producer Don Kirshner, Liz Larsen as Carole’s mother, Genie, as well as Ashley Blanchet, E. Clayton Cornelious, Joshua Davis, Alysha Deslorieux, Kevin Duda, Carly Hughes, Sara King, Rebecca LaChance, Douglas Lyons, Chris Peluso, Gabrielle Reid, Arbender Robinson, Rashidra Scott, Sara Shepard, Antoine L. Smith, and Melvin Tunstall.
Featured on the creative team are Derek McLane (set design), Alejo Vietti (costume design), Peter Kaczorowski (lighting design), Brian Ronan (sound design), Charles G. LaPointe (wig and hair design), Steve Sidwell (orchestrations and music arrangements), Jason Howland (music supervision), John Miller (music coordination), and Stephen Kopel (casting).
Beautiful explores the early life and career of the four-time Grammy Award-winning King, from her Brooklyn upbringing (when she was still called Carol Klein) to her great success in the music industry with fellow writers and friends Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann and her husband, Gerry Goffin. Using a score culled from Goffin, King, Mann, and Weil’s catalogue of hits, Beautiful features a book by Academy Award nominee Douglas McGrath (Bullets Over Broadway). Marc Bruni (The Explorers Club) directs, with Josh Prince serving as choreographer.
(© Nathan Johnson)
