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"Look, guys, short of a lunch date at the home of Jay and Bey, there are few things I would lure you to frigid New York City to experience right now. But since four days later, I&amp;#x27;m still humming, smiling, and occasionally tearing up over it, I have to tell you why Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is worth busting your piggy bank and bundling up to get to. As life-changing musicals go, it&amp;#x27;s right up there with Les Mis, Wicked, and Billy Elliott. Here&amp;#x27;s why I loved Beautiful so much: It goes without saying that the music is great&amp;amp;#8212;but there&amp;#x27;s so much more great music than you expect. I had no idea that King cowrote early classics like &amp;quot;One Fine Day&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Locomotion&amp;quot;&amp;amp;#8212;and no idea I&amp;#x27;d get to watch a crackling ensemble with &amp;#x27;60s-perfect moves and &amp;#x27;dos belt them. Jessie Mueller is fabulous. Not just Broadway fabulous. I-instantly-want-to-be-her-or-at-least-be-her-buddy fabulous. It&amp;#x27;s not just that her gorgeous voice presents rich shades of Carole without seeming like a knockoff; it&amp;#x27;s that she has this charisma that makes you want to root for her. Which leads me to my next point... The characters really hook you in. Every musical has a story; it&amp;#x27;s stronger in some shows than in others. But I&amp;#x27;ve never heard an audience clap and whoop at story points like I did during this show&amp;amp;#8212;and it&amp;#x27;s all because you feel protective of Jessie&amp;#x27;s Carole all of 45 minutes after meeting her. The boys are darling. And super pedigreed. Jake Epstein, who plays Carole&amp;#x27;s first husband, Gerry Goffin, just played the lead in Broadway&amp;#x27;s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark&amp;amp;#8212;and Jarrod Spector, who plays songwriter Barry Mann, was Frankie Valli for 1,500 Jersey Boys performances. (So there&amp;#x27;s a chance your grandma beat you to crushing on him.) The theater has great camaraderie. I know that sounds funny, but just wait until you&amp;#x27;re gasping along with the rest of the crowd when an old favorite song is introduced in the dialogue. Also, not gonna spoil anything, but this show wraps up in an unmissable way. Don&amp;#x27;t be running out during the bows; just get the later bus. You&amp;#x27;ll be glad you stayed. It&amp;#x27;s basically the best thing ever to see with your lady family members. I looked around during intermission and realized just about everyone around me seemed to break down into the hard-core older fans who played Tapestry in their dorms and the younger I-saw-Carole-on-the-Grammys fans they&amp;#x27;d brought along. Everywhere you looked, the moms were filling in gaps for the daughters&amp;amp;#8212;yep, she got married at 17; yep, I watched American Bandstand; yep, she didn&amp;#x27;t sing her own songs for years. I saw the show with my mother, aunt, and sister-in-law. For my sister-in-law and me, there was a lot of love-at-first-listen going on; my mom and aunt were basically reliving the soundtrack that stretched from their moms washing dishes when they were little to music in their first apartments. It&amp;#x27;s amazing to watch a new generation fall in love with a legend in real time. The lessons of Carole are timeless. Forget the stomach-flippingly gorgeous melodies she dreamt up. What I love most about Carole King, Beautiful reminded me, is that while the rest of the world seemed to change with each tumultuous year in the &amp;#x27;60s and &amp;#x27;70s, Carole remained steadily and totally herself. And she didn&amp;#x27;t even begin to sing until well into the career she launched as a kid, when she already had two babies and a divorce under her belt. It just goes to show: It&amp;#x27;s never too early to start on your dreams, and it&amp;#x27;s never too late to find your voice."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/entertainment/blogs/obsessed/2014/01/beautiful-the-carole-king-musi>