Taylor Swift was still in her Red era when Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opened on Broadway in 2014. The high-end jukebox musical about the intersection of songwriting and relationships hits differently a decade later, in the golden age of Spotify. Today listeners analyze song lyrics like Bletchley Park codebreakers. Is Joe Alwyn “the smallest man who’s ever lived”? Is Drake dissing Kendrick yet again?

Nostalgia, not lyrical intrigue, is why boomers turned out in droves to see Beautiful on Broadway and the subsequent North American tours, which lapped through the Kennedy Center twice. The show features nearly two dozen hits by Carole King, her late lyricist ex-husband Gerry Goffin, and their songwriting frenemies Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, including “The Loco-Motion,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “One Fine Day.”

Olney Theatre Center opened its own pretty fine production of Beautiful Saturday, July 6. The songs are still chart-toppers from ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, but the biographical drama now feels ripped from a Reddit thread in a way that may resonate with younger theatergoers:

“Will you still love me tomorrow?” That may depend on whether or not Gerry is still cheating. Though Carole is inclined to forgive Gerry, is it too late, baby? What if he really is the asshole?

See Beautiful and discuss!

Natalie Weiss, a multihyphenate performer with 239,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, stars as King, who ages from a 16-year-old Brooklyn prodigy to 30-something star at Carnegie Hall. Weiss’ own journey to Olney started in 2012, when she talked a castmate on the Les Misérables tour into singing a few seconds of Beyoncé’s “Halo” with her backstage and launched her aforementioned YouTube series, Breaking Down the Riffs.

The trick to hitting a tricky accidental note in a riff, Weiss tells Briana Carlson-Goodman in the video clip, is to “Tilt your head and make a weird face like this.” Weiss cocks her head sideways and delivers a one-eyed squint. “Oh! That helps!” says her castmate. The two women proceed to ooo and ahh in homage to Queen Bey.

That combination of virtuosic pipes and off-kilter humor parlayed Weiss into theater-internet fandom, and makes her perfect to play the self-deprecating King, who wrote songs for others for decades before gaining the confidence to sing them herself. Like King, Weiss delivers her strongest performances when she’s seated at a piano and setting the tempo. She plays a baby grand live in Beautiful’s opening and closing numbers, and, at many moments in between, takes a seat and fakes it on an altered silent upright, her feet pumping nonexistent pedals out of habit.

Like that rejiggered piano on wheels, the rest of Olney’s production is uneven and has moments that feel low budget. Each actor switches wigs up to six times to indicate changes in character and decades, and many bobs, bouffants, and flat-tops are so atrocious they distract from the performances. As Goffin, Michael Perrie Jr. lacks ladies’ man charm, with a voice a bit too nasally for the job. Sometimes, when he harmonizes with Weiss, it’s a relief when the ensemble struts out to replicate the Shirelles, the Drifters, and other groups that bought songs from Goffin and King.

There’s no orchestra pit, so the sound of live musicians is piped in, and not at the same quality level as some other local theaters. Microphone tech issues also marred opening night. Most ensemble vocals, however, were still top-notch. D.C. regulars Kurt Boehm and Connor James Reilly stopped the show with the tenor and bass-baritone duet “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” a No. 1 penned by Mann and Weil for the Righteous Brothers.

As the witty Weil and hypochondriac Mann, Nikki Mirza and Calvin McCullough make a better couple than the leads, a credit to their voices, individual acting chops, and the relationship arc written by Douglas McGrath. Tap-dancing Bobby Smith, Washington’s go-to for middle-aged curmudgeons, moves the plot forward as Don Kirshner, the producer badgering both couples to hurry up and write more hits.

Many musical numbers are cleverly juxtaposed against the writers’ lives. “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” for example, is positioned as a declaration from Weil to Mann. (They end up on the rocks later.) “Take Good Care of My Baby” references King and Goffin’s daughter Louise, born when King was still a teen.

Whether all lyrical nods in the musical are authentic references to real-life emotions and events is a matter for postshow internet searches. (Spoiler alert: Looks like the singer Goffin cheated with is named Jeanie, not Janelle.) The more immediate takeaway is that without King and Weil paving the way at 1650 Broadway, we never get to the Tortured Poets Era of 2024, a year that also brought us the likes of Chappell Roan, Cowboy Carter, new bops from Billie Eilish, and a fantastic album that still has me wondering what kind of asshole would stand up Maggie Rogers for a Knicks game?

At Beautiful’s end, after King finally cuts ties with Goffin, Kirshner assures the singer-songwriter that she still has a place in the music biz. “You write girl songs,” he tells her. “They’re really popular now.”

He’s right. They are.

Beautiful, directed by Amy Anders Corcoran, book by Douglas McGrath, and words and music by Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil, runs through Aug. 25 at Olney Theatre Center. olneytheatre.org. $31–$96.