Neil Diamond Musical Reveals Troubled Man Behind Parade of Greatest Hits

Our highly respected colleagues in the Sarasota area have created a website similar to ours called ArtsBeat.org. We will publish some of their fine insightful work on occasion when the show is likely to come to South Florida on a tour, or when a production will be of interest to local readers.  In this case, this national tour is at the Kravis Center through April 12 will be coming to the Arsht Center this December 1-6.

By Carrie Seidman / ArtsBeat.org

The biographical musical has become a Broadway genre unto itself, with a generally tenuous story line providing the opportunity for a string of jukebox greatest hits guaranteed to draw fans eager to revisit the feel of a live concert from their musical idol, even if it isn’t the real deal.

In that sense, A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical is exactly what you would expect: a visually flashy, high-energy parade of more than two dozen of the acclaimed singer/songwriter’s enduring tunes that prompt audience members to lip synch, clap and respond with what The New York Times called “Pavlovian singalongs” to ear-worms like “Sweet Caroline.”

But the unexpected convention here is the set up. Writer Anthony McCarten has framed the show around a series of therapy sessions in which an older Diamond (Robert Westenberg as “Neil — Now”) sits across from his therapist (Lisa Renee Pitts), reluctantly digging into why, despite his decades of fame and fortune and all exterior indications, he’s still fighting the “clouds” of anxiety, self-doubt and depression that have plagued him his entire life. To prod his reflection, the doctor pulls out a hefty Neil Diamond songbook, which becomes a repeated touchstone to spark the flashbacks that follow, allowing the singer’s career and life to spool out, hit by hit. (The older Diamond and the doctor remain, unobtrusively, on stage throughout.)

On opening night of the touring production at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, the anticipated headliner, Nick Fradiani — best known as the 2015 winner of American Idol — was out sick. That may have been a disappointment to Fradiani followers, but not necessarily to Diamond fans because his replacement, “standby” Joe Caskey, may have looked even more like Diamond and sounded uncannily like the superstar himself. Though his performance was understated, Caskey has the voice and the guitar-playing chops to give at least the illusion of authenticity.

The initial flashback is to 1965, the day Diamond — born in Flatbush, Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents — meets Ellie Greenwich, a singer, producer and songwriter who was the “top hitmaker of the ‘60s.” For the seven years since he wrote his first song for his high school sweetheart and later, first wife, Jaye (Tiffany Tatreau), he’s been trying without success to sell his work and he suggests maybe a name change may be in order. An incredulous Greenwich — “Neil Diamond is your actual name? — convinces him otherwise and takes him on, catalyzing the sale of his first big hit, for the Monkees, “I’m a Believer.”

But the way others perform his songs is not the way Diamond hears them in his head. When the woman who would become his second wife, Marcia Murphy (Hannah Jewel Kohn), calls his voice “gravel wrapped in velvet… like you just woke up and tripped over an ashtray,” and tells him he’s too good to write for other people, Diamond launches his solo career at The Bitter End, the legendary Greenwich Village music venue. (Steven Hoggett’s choreography for the crowd watching him, their arms reaching toward the performer in a foreshadowing of what would become the standard response to the “reaching out” line in “Sweet Caroline,” is as subtle here as it is over-the-top for the backup dancers later in the show.)

At the start, Diamond dresses in monotone black, performs songs like “Solitary Man” and “Song Sung Blue” and is so morose and self-effacing, Murphy urges him to “Cheer up, Hamlet!” But soon he’s stepping out in ever flashier outfits before ever more frenzied crowds on his way to superstardom. Along the way we touch on some of the notable milestones of his career and his life, many of which became the material for the hits that start coming one after another.

The crumbling of his first marriage brings us “September Morn” and “Love on the Rocks,” which Caskey and Tatreau perform as poignant duets. His signing with Bang Records (their logo is a handgun), a mob-run label headed by Bert Berns (Michael Accardo) and the resulting blackmail he experienced when he tried to get out of his contract leads to “the song that would literally save my life,” “Sweet Caroline,” which brings the audience to its feet at the intermission break.

Yet even as he becomes “the biggest box office draw in the country,” the “clouds” continue to follow Diamond and enduring love to elude him. The shirts get sparklier, the concert crowds more frenzied, the light show more dazzling and the moves on stage more sexual. But his constant touring takes its toll on his second marriage which ends in divorce after 25 years, prompting Caskey and Kohn to combine their strong voices for a wrenching rendition of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

In 2018, Diamond was forced to retire from touring due to advancing Parkinsons disease; it was his third wife, Katie, who was finding him “a little hard to live with,” that prompted the therapy sessions that form the through line of this show. Yet near the end of this two-hour+ production, we’re not much closer to understanding Diamond’s demons than we were at the start.

Though it’s the fault of the book more than his direction, Michael Mayer, who has kept the hits coming at a pace steady enough to satisfy nostalgia seekers for most of the show, hits a slump near the end. In a flashback to the generation that preceded him, the older Diamond finally digs deep and reveals the childhood roots of his discontent in a way that feels both a little contrived and, at the same time, overblown.

A sentimental sequence follows which includes “Brooklyn Roads,” “America” and “Shilo,” a tribute to Diamond’s imaginary childhood friend, performed beautifully by an ensemble member. The finale, with the entire cast dressed in uniform black combining for a thundering “I Am…I Said” is an unexpectedly somber finish.

That is, until it segues into a romping, stomping reprise of “America,” a string of curtain calls, a pitch for an AIDS organization fundraiser and…here’s the moment the crowd has been waiting for….a final repeat of “Sweet Caroline.” At least for Neil Diamond fans, it was all “So good! So good! So good!”

“A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical,” at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Additional performances through April 4. $66-126. 941-263-6799; vanwezel.org.

This story was originally published by ArtsBeat, a non-profit website producing coverage of the arts scene in the Sarasota area. Learn more at ArtsBeat.org.