Making ‘Beautiful’ music: Real-life couple behind musical’s characters reflect on Carole King and their career

The odds are good that Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil are responsible for a song you love. “On Broadway,” “Walking in the Rain,” “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” “Here You Come Again,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” – they’re all Mann-Weil compositions.

On top of their hit song catalog, the retired writing duo are now Broadway characters, having been dramatized in supporting roles in the Tony Award-winning stage biopic “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” The touring show, which opens at the INB Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, begins in the late ’50s as King and the late Gerry Goffin form a professional and personal partnership and closes with King recording her best-selling 1971 solo album “Tapestry.”

In anticipation of the musical’s upcoming Spokane premiere, Mann and Weil, who have been married for 55 years, talked to The Spokesman-Review about their careers in show business, working for Phil Spector and what it’s like to be turned into theatrical characters.

The Spokesman-Review: Were you involved in the production of “Beautiful”?

Cynthia Weil: Doug McGrath, the book writer, met with all four of us – Gerry was alive at that time – when the show was being constructed. He interviewed each of us for a few days and came away with what he thought were our essences.

Barry Mann: And we were involved in the auditions. Anybody who played us, we had our say. We had to OK it.

SR: What was it like watching yourselves come to life onstage?

Mann: I loved it. I thought it was great. I love the way Doug wrote us. We’re kind of comic relief in the show, and it comes off great.

Weil: We used to tell the book writer that Carole and Gerry were Lucy and Desi and we were Fred and Ethel.

SR: Well, you’ve got to have a Fred and Ethel.

Weil: You absolutely have to have a Fred and Ethel! And I’m thrilled to be Ethel.

Mann: Me, too. I wish I was Ethel.

Weil: (laughs) He’s never satisfied.

SR: How accurately does the show depict you?

Weil: You know, the essence of it is very accurate. There’s some moving around of songs and situations, but the love and competition between the two couples is portrayed very accurately.

SR: What was it like working in pop music in the ’50s and ’60s?

Weil: It was an instant gratification business at the time, because it was a singles market. You would write a song, and within a week or two it would be recorded, and if you were lucky, you heard it on the air and you watched it go up the charts. It was a lot of fun, it was a lot of pressure, and there was a lot of stress.

Mann: The competition really was gut wrenching. At the same, we learned a lot. We thought of it almost as a school. They call it the “hit factory,” which I really hate, because it’s as if we just churned them out and wrote them in 10 minutes. And that’s not true. … We worked very hard on these songs.

SR: Do you recall your first impressions of Carole King?

Mann: I met Carole before she was part of the scene. I happened to go up to a record company – I was going to play some songs – and there was this 15-year-old kid, maybe 16, in jeans and a sweatshirt. I started to talk to her, and she was so confident. I said to myself, if this kid starts to make it, she’ll really hit it. You could just feel that she was very confident about herself musically, as a songwriter. Carole doesn’t even remember it.

Weil: I showed (producer) Don Kirshner some lyrics, and he said, “I have the perfect person for you to work with,” and he brings in this little girl who looked about 12, although she was 17 at the time. … Carole and I made a date to meet, and I went all the way out to her basement apartment in Brooklyn. I had to take two trains, and I was not used to the subway because I was a Manhattan princess. When I got there, she played me a melody that I instinctively knew was really good, but I was so nervous about taking the subway again that I couldn’t concentrate. So I said, “Listen, let me take this home, and I’ll get an idea for some lyrics and call you back.” So I go home through the subway, and when I got home, the phone was ringing and it was Carole. She said, “This is not a great way to start a writing relationship, but Gerry came home and has a great idea for that melody I gave you. So I have to take it back.” And I said, “Oh yeah, what’s this great idea?” And she said, “Take Good Care of My Baby,” which was a No. 1 song for Bobby Vee.

SR: What was it like working with Phil Spector?

Mann: We had a lot of fun with him. We really did.

Weil: We were very compassionate when it came to Phil. We kind of understood his craziness. You know, after “Lovin’ Feelin’,” we had started to work with him again. We started a song called “Soul and Inspiration,” but we didn’t want to finish it because we thought it was too close to “Lovin’ Feelin’.” So Phil just dropped us then, and he went to write with Carole and Gerry. But we kind of accepted that, because that’s the way things were then.

Mann: Phil got worse as he got older. I mean, he wasn’t quite normal then, but he wasn’t as bad as he turned out.

SR: There are stories that he would sometimes demand dozens of takes. Did you ever experience that?

Mann: Yes, we did. We wrote a song called “Uptown” – it was a top 10 record. The lead singer couldn’t hit some of the high notes, so we brought in another singer.

Weil: Well, tell him who the singer was.

Mann: It happened to be Little Eva.

Weil: Who was Carole’s babysitter.

Mann: It was before she had a hit with “The Loco-Motion” (written by Goffin and King). Anyway, she was on the mic, and she didn’t know that when you talk on the mic, you can hear it in the control room. The music would stop, but the mic stayed on. Phil kept telling her to try it again and again and again. It must have been about 30 takes. And she said, “This guy’s a mean guy. He’s bad.” We went back to the other singer, and the melody was changed. We got rid some of the high notes.

SR: Circling back to “Beautiful,” what do you hope people take away from the show?

Weil: I think the theme is finding your voice. In the show, Carole starts out writing for other people and suffers some heartbreak in her own life, which she then rises above. It’s a combination of everything that happened to her that has her going to California and writing “Tapestry,” which was an iconic album of that generation.

Mann: And there’s a little subtext about the competition and friendship between us. It really works very well.

SR: Do you think it will inspire people who aren’t already familiar with your music to seek out more of it?

Mann: Oh, absolutely. But they realize they (already) know all these songs.

Weil: They just never knew who the writers were. Often we’ll see in the audience the three generations – the grandparents, who are our contemporaries, the parents who are in their 30s and 40s and the younger generation who discovers this music. And each one enjoys it.