They were chasing hits while collaborating and competing with each other all in a 9 to 5 job during an era where the push was on to make American pop music even more popular.<\/p>\n
In Beautiful \u2013 The Carole King Musical<\/strong>, opening Tuesday at Theatre Under the Stars at the Hobby Center, the story of these pop composers is a large part of how King rose from writer to superstar performer. \u00a0<\/p>\n Barrett Riggins (last seen at TUTS in Memphis and Beauty and the Beast) plays Barry Mann who ends up pairing with (and later marrying) fellow songwriter Cynthia Weil while King teams up(also later marrying) with Gerry Goffin. As the Tony Award-winning musical unfolds, one marriage remains solid, the other not so much.<\/p>\n But the music they were writing has lasted. From Carole King : \u201cSo Far Away,\u201d \u201cWill You Love Me Tomorrow,\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s too Late,\u201d \u201cYou Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,\u201d \u2013 are just some of the songs the musical contains. \u00a0From Barry Mann: \u201cYou\u2019ve Lost that Loving Feeling\u201d with the Righteous Brothers, \u201cWe Gotta Get Out of This Place.\u201d Cynthis Weil and Barry Mann: \u201cWalking in the Rain.\u201d Gerry Goffin: \u201cTake Good Care of My Baby with Carole King. The list, as Riggins puts it, \u201cis immense.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBarry Mann [who wrote] was a songwriter born in Brooklyn and I\u2019m a songwriter living in Brooklyn so there\u2019s a unity there that\u2019s really fun and a unique opportunity for me. \u00a0I\u2019ve been writing as well as acting my whole life,\u201d Riggins says.<\/p>\n Asked to describe his character, Riggins says: \u201cBarry is a extremely neurotic and competitive young songwriter when we meet him. What\u2019s so fun about Beautiful, of course, [while] people are coming to see the history of\u00a0 Carole King, the show tracks these two pairs of songwriters. You see them both as contracted songwriters in this period of creative ecstasy in the \u201860s as they both were trying to one up each other.<\/p>\n \u201cOne team would come out with this No. 1 hit and the [other] team would respond. I think the audience gets caught up in the competition and it\u2019s very fun.\u201d<\/p>\n There is still collaboration in songs being written today, but not in exactly the same way, Riggins says. As depicted in the musical, \u201cIt was at this building, 1650 Broadway, which was actually the scrappier younger brother to \u00a0the Brill Building which was even more sort of the songwriting institution factory.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was many of the record labels had contracted singers as well,\u201d Riggins says. \u201cIt was a 9 to 5 job, grab your coffee, and you write. You pump out pop songs and then they make a demo and pair it to an artist.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think there was a thrill as well for Mann and Weil to be chameleonic composers. They worked for decades. They worked in the theater, in film, in pop. You see them even in the show going from what we would consider early rock and roll sounds to much more \u201860s -inspired songs sung by the Monkees or more psychedelic protest rock. The fact that this was all coming from the same voices.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe story of Beautiful is ultimately the story of how Carole King came to realize she should be the one singing her own songs and to take ownership of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Performances are scheduled for May 19-31 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at the Hobby Center, 800 Bagby. For more information, call 713-558-8887 or visit tuts.org. $60-$169.<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They were chasing hits while collaborating and competing with each other all in a 9 to 5 job…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":805335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5130],"tags":[327805,12730,327806,4345,358,167418,91038,3187],"class_list":["post-805334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-carole-kine","tag-homepage","tag-hopuston-theater","tag-houston","tag-texas","tag-theatre-under-the-stars","tag-tuts","tag-tx"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116596268884910187","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}