Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil: 'Beautiful' is their story, too

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opens at the Academy of Music on Tuesday. It's playwright Douglas McGrath's tale of how musicmaker Carole King went from writing pop songs in the late 1950s to becoming the goddess of the singer-songwriter movement with 1971's multiplatinum album Tapestry. The jukebox musical spins King hits soulful ("Some Kind of Wonderful") and heartfelt ("You've Got a Friend").

But a good half of the show's tunes come from two of King's best buddies, the famously married songwriting team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. When King and then-husband Gerry Goffin were writing pop classics, Mann and Weil were writing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration," and even "On Broadway." In a show ostensibly about King, we learn all about Mann and Weil. Isn't that a little strange?

"She's a good girl," Mann says with a laugh from the Los Angeles home he shares with Weil, giggling on the other line. "Carole has a wonderful story," says Weil, "and above and beyond that - and us - she has a name that most people recognize." Mann mentions the biggest difference between themselves and King: "Unlike us, she was a performer, an iconic one."

Mann and Weil met and befriended King and Goffin at the storied Brill Building. Thus was born the frenemy relationship that drives Beautiful. The Mann-Weil team penned hits well into the 21st century, with a songwriting style that actually earns the adjective timeless. "Our melodies could've been written and published in other eras," says Mann. "The '40s, the '60s, the '80s, now."

The pair say Beautiful tells it true: King and Goffin first met lyricist Weil, who also happened to be looking for a musical collaborator and found it in Mann. Did they hit it off romantically before they did artistically?

"Yeah, you could say that," states Mann.

"I didn't exactly play hard to get," says Weil.

How does Beautiful do in portraying the friendship and competitiveness between the two teams? Both wrote songs for girl groups, with King/Goffin's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" having more success than Mann/Weil's "He's Sure the Boy I Love," and Mann/Weil/Phil Spector's "Lovin' Feelin' " becoming a bigger hit than King/Goffin/Spector's undervalued "Just Once in My Life." Did McGrath get the feeling right?

"No. Yes," begins Mann. Weil calls the portrayal of all that "a Rashomon" perspective.

Mann describes how McGrath worked up his book for the show, recording reminiscences from the two teams. He thinks McGrath got a sense of who the foursome were and the facts of their lives. He also ran things by them; had anyone objected to anything, McGrath would have changed it. "He didn't just run off with our story," Weil says.

"I'll tell you," Mann says conspiratorially. "Going back to your first question, you know, this play started out to be a story about all four of us. Until he got to Carole, whose tale you couldn't tell without doing Tapestry. That turned everything around for her and the story, put the focus on Carole, and it got decided that it would be more her story than ours. We understood that. Carole and Gerry were Lucy and Desi, and Cynthia and I were Fred and Ethel."

The competitive nature of the business and their relationships are fully represented in Beautiful, a difficult thing to discuss, because the Mann/Weils loved the King/Goffins, "yet we wanted to get every single record songwriting job for ourselves," Weil says.

"They felt the same way about us. Trust me," Mann says, laughing. "We're still best friends with Carole."

Goffin, a complicated man ("Gerry was bipolar before people knew the term or how to treat it," Weil says) whose legend is overshadowed by King's, died in 2014. In Beautiful, he appears as a man of talent ("he had a real ear for production," Mann says) and prescience.

"Gerry knew that music was changing with Dylan," Mann says. "We weren't ignorant of it, but Gerry really had that sussed early."

These days, Mann and Weil exhibit their photos (him) and write novels (her, I'm Glad I Did). They say they retired from songwriting because of how competitive and pressurized the business had become, but they miss the craft. Might they ever write a Broadway musical?

"We worked so long to get out of it and now long to do it again, so who knows?" says Weil.

Is there anything they'd like to change about Beautiful?

Mann laughs. "I'd like to have 10 more of our songs in there."

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical

Tuesday through April 3 at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Streets.

Tickets: $31.50-$130.

Information: 215-731-3333 or www.kimmelcenter.org