Judging by A Beautiful Noise, the creators of jukebox musicals are getting desperate. Book writer Anthony McCarten would seem to have strong credentials for the assignment, including the screenplays for Bohemian Rhapsody and the upcoming Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody as well as the critically acclaimed play The Collaboration, about Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat. So he clearly knows his way around pop music and colorful personalities. And yet the best framework he could come up with for this show about Neil Diamond is to have an elderly, depressed pop star reluctantly telling his life story through his songs to his psychotherapist. We should probably be grateful he didn’t also show Diamond preparing for a colonoscopy.
To be fair, it’s a reasonably intriguing idea to explore Diamond’s apparently morose psyche through his lyrics. It’s obvious that their composer had a dark side, evident even in the sunniest of pop songs. Take “I’m a Believer,” which was a smash hit for The Monkees. Sure, it sounds jaunty when you sing it. But take a closer look at the lyrics: “I thought love was more or less a giving thing/Seems the more I gave the less I got/What’s the use in tryin’, all you get is pain/When I needed sunshine, I got rain.” Then there’s “Shiloh,” about a child who turns to an imaginary friend because he has no real ones, and “Solitary Man,” and “Song Sung Blue,” and, well, you get the idea.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The problem is that Diamond, at least as he’s portrayed here, isn’t much fun to spend two-and-a-quarter hours with. Will Swenson and Mark Jacoby, as the younger and older versions respectively, do what they can, with the former obviously having the advantage because he gets to show off the sequined outfits and sing all of the hits. But the more they both mope about the problems of being a rich and famous pop star adored by millions, the more you want to channel your inner Cher, slap them silly, and yell, “Snap out of it!”
It doesn’t help that as the younger Diamond’s life unfolds, the older version sits along with his shrink on leather chairs on the side of the stage, grimacing in mental anguish and occasionally making acerbic comments. It seems an unnecessary device, since that’s what theater critics are for.
The real reason for a show like this, of course, is not to do a deep dive into its subject’s psyche but rather to deliver full-throttle versions of the hits that baby boomers, those theatergoers with the most disposable income, grew up hearing. You’ll hear nearly thirty of them in the course of the evening, including the first act closer, “Sweet Caroline,” which inspires the inevitable sing-along that will brand you as a social misfit if you don’t enthusiastically participate. The song, incidentally, is shown as coming to Diamond like some sort of lifesaving, God-given inspiration, roughly akin to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on the tablets.
Not knowing the details of Diamond’s life, I assume that this rendition in which he burns through two marriages (he’s now happily married to his third wife), achieves success as a performer despite near-crippling shyness and insecurity, stands up to his first record label which was financed by mob money, and eventually becomes a non-stop touring machine who sacrifices both his and his family’s happiness on the altar of pop stardom, is reasonably close to the truth. But one hopes that it played out far more interestingly in real life. This is the sort of show in which one of the most dramatic scenes concerns a squabble between Diamond and his wife over whether or not to cancel a lunch date with Barbra Streisand. Although, to be fair, Robert Redford was also supposed to be there.
To say that the musical’s staging by Michael Mayer feels overly literal is an understatement. During “Song Sung Blue,” the audience is bathed in blue light. When Diamond’s marriage to his first wife Jaye (Jessie Fisher) implodes, she sings, “Love on the Rocks.” “Forever in Blue Jeans” features the performers clad in blue jeans. When Diamond’s marriage to his second wife Marcia (a dynamic and sexy Robyn Hurder, nearly stealing the show) ends, we hear “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” And in “Sweet Caroline,” during the lyrics “Hands, touching hands/Reaching out, touching me, touching you,” disembodied hands suddenly appear from behind a couch. It makes you relieved Diamond didn’t write “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick.”
Those hands, by the way, belong to a ten-member singing and dancing ensemble dubbed “The Beautiful Noise,” composed of an admirably physically and ethnically diverse group of performers. They act as a sort of Greek chorus, constantly popping up whenever it seems least necessary and forced to perform ungainly choreography devised by Steven Hoggett (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) that lives up to the name of the theater company he co-founded, Frantic Assembly.
A bewigged Will Swenson doesn’t look much like Diamond, but he deepens his voice effectively enough to sound reasonably like him, although not quite living up to a character’s description, “gravel wrapped in velvet.” You can feel his relief when he finally gets to wear the silly outfits and cut loose in the big production numbers like “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” which is a hell of a lot more fun than, say, “Hello Again.” If his approach ultimately feels less like a performance than an inspired bit of karaoke, Swenson still fares better than Jacoby, a wonderful, veteran musical theater performer who here has the unenviable task of moping on stage for two hours before finally getting his turn to shine with a galvanizing rendition of “I Am…I Said.” But by then it feels like too little, too late.
A Beautiful Noise opened December 4, 2022, at the Broadhurst Theatre. Tickets and information: abeautifulnoisethemusical.com
