At Queens College in New York in the late 1950s, Carole King met her future husband and collaborator Gerry Goffin. They’d only be together for about a decade, but in that time would create an unbelievable amount of hits. Among them was “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” first recorded by The Shirelles, “Locomotion,” recorded by Little Eva, and “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman,” Aretha Franklin’s famous anthem. King and Goffin couldn’t make their marriage work, and in a lot of ways, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” with a book by Douglas McGrath, is about King reclaiming her career and artistry after her partnership with Goffin fell apart. The musical addresses some of the problems of the relationship, but it also celebrates the spark that came out of these two artists coming together.
Chanhassen Dinner Theatre’s production features the gifted singer and performer Monet Sabel, who starred in the national Broadway tour of “Beautiful.” It’s co-directed by Cat and Michael Brindisi, a father and daughter team who navigate the storytelling in the musical as deftly as King and Goffin crafted their narrative-driven songs. I chatted with the directors about their first co-directing experience with each other, their history as a show business family, and some of the things they were thinking about while working on the show.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sheila Regan: Cat, did you perform at Chanhassen when you were a kid?
Cat Brindisi: Yes, though it wasn’t the very first place I performed. I actually was in “The Christmas Carol” before that at the Guthrie. I played Want. That was when I was six. But yes, I performed there as a child. And so I feel like I grew up there.
SR: What was the first performance you did at Chanhassen?
CB: I did “State Fair” when I was seven years old. We got to ride a roller coaster. And then I did “Brigadoon” and a bunch after that. It was very fun as a kid. It was like the best first experience.
SR: Do you guys have other family members that are also in the business?
Michael Brindisi: Yeah, my wife, Michelle is an actress that played a lot of roles for us. Like Dolly in “Hello, Dolly.” Cat and Michelle were in that together. Michelle is currently at the Ten Thousand Things doing the “The Spitfire Grill.” And she’s really enjoying that. And then she’s going to play the housekeeper, Martha, in “White Christmas” for us in October. So yeah, we are definitely a theater family.
SR: Cat, even when you weren’t in the shows, were you kind at the theater all the time as well?
CB: The theater was more of my home than my actual home, because I was there so much. I grew up running on the ramps at the otter pond with a billion aunts and uncles that were all the actors and the waitstaff.
People talk about it being such a unique place to work because there is that sort of family element where the runs are so long that you have no choice but to get really close with the people that you’re in a dressing room with eight shows a week.
People raise their kids there. People come from New York or somewhere else and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can have a family and work here. This is amazing,’ and they end up settling here. It’s so unique in that way to any other theater that I’ve worked at. Usually it’s a two month run, and then the show closes, and then you move on with your life. But there are upwards of nine months to a year here. So it’s just a totally different game.
SR: The theater seems to cultivate that with the audience as well, when they announce all of the birthdays and anniversaries at the start of the show.
CB: It is. It’s special.
MB: Michelle and I had this really great situation because I got my job as artistic director in ’87. And Cat was born in ’88. Michelle was an actress in the company, so my job was primarily daytime. And she would go to work at night. We had very little daycare involved. She would take care of Cat all day, and then I would get her to sleep, or we’d watch the first act of the show and I take her home, get her to sleep. That went on for quite a while. And that was really, really fortunate.
SR: Do you remember, what show Cat watched that?
CB: My mom was pregnant with me for “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” That was ’87. She was pregnant with me right up until I was born, and they just kept letting her costume out.
SR: Anything you guys might say about choices you two made that were different from the Broadway version of this musical?
MB: The biggest change we made was we didn’t open the play with Carole at the piano. Cat actually suggested that. She said, ‘You know, one thing I don’t like about this play is that she’s behind the piano a lot.’ And she said it to me early on in one of our meetings. That really sparked some ideas for me in terms of the transitions and some of the things we did differently.
We were having a lot of trouble in design figuring out how to get the piano on gracefully and then and then off for the flashback. We went through a whole period where we were trying to design it into the set, so that it was always there. But it didn’t look like a piano. And we even had one out-there abstract idea that it was a piece of cloth painted like a piano and then like a magic act, the cloth went away and the piano went away. We finally said, ‘Why don’t we just not have the piano in the beginning?’ She could be any place in Carnegie Hall, she could be in her dressing room. She could be sitting in the wings, she could be talking to the real audience or talking to the audience at Carnegie Hall. Monet was on board the whole way.
SR: This story is told from Carole King’s perspective, and it talks about Gerry cheating on her. Did you have discussions or thoughts about bringing nuance to the story by showing his perspective?
CB: For sure. Early on, Shad Hanley, who plays Gerry, brought to the table this defensiveness of Gerry, which none of us had going into rehearsals. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really good actor,’ because he loves the person that he’s portraying. He really believes that Gerry was just a complicated human being and had addiction issues and major mental health issues.
We all liked Gerry by the end of our rehearsal process, because he is the most complicated person in the show, and definitely the most interesting character to me. He just went through so much and was not wanting to lie to his wife. He was like, ‘I want this relationship with Janelle, but I want to have both. I don’t want to end our marriage with you.’ That’s so beyond that time period. I give a lot of credit to Shad for coming in with that.
There’s a part where on tour and on Broadway, there is an applause point for Carole, when she finally stands up to him. In our production, nine times out of 10, they don’t. I just think it’s awesome, because I’m like, yes, it’s a complicated relationship. It’s a real life based on real life facts. And I think people are torn.
MB: I think this was the great thing about having Cat work on this show, because so often, in these “jukebox musicals,” the directing tends to be skimming the story, to get to the song and the next song. If you take that attitude, then that’s what you’re going to end up with. And we didn’t. We decided early on to dig into the gravitas of it, and to really try to hone out the drama of it.
CB: The other challenge that we found was that the Black people’s stories are really not fleshed out at all in the play. So having discussions with those actors and realizing we all need to be doing our research about who they were. Kate Marie, who plays Little Eva, she just did so much work on it. I just feel like her performance pays off so well, because of all the work she did, where she just learned all this stuff about who this woman was. Little Eva had a crazy life where she was in this horribly abusive marriage and was entertaining people every night. She was the babysitter for Gerry and Carole, and was just a very complex individual.
MB: Cat is demonstrating here, what she brings to the table. She’s really sharp. Cat immediately zones in on that stuff. And that’s really helpful to me.
“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” runs through September 28 at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. $75-$105 regular price, $55-85 show only). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
