Nick Fradiani as 'Neil - Then' (centre) and 'The Noise' in 'A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical.'Jeremy-Daniel/Supplied
- Title: A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical
- Written by: Anthony McCarten, with music and lyrics by Neil Diamond
- Performed by: Nick Fradiani, Robert Westenberg, Mary Page Nance, Amber Ardolino, Lisa Reneé Pitts, Michael Accardo, Heidi Kettenring, Tiffany Tatreau, Gene Weygandt
- Director: Michael Mayer
- Company: Mirvish Productions
- Venue: Princess of Wales Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs until June 7
“Inside you, there are two wolves,” says Neil Diamond’s therapist near the top of A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, the jukebox show about the tunes and tribulations of – you guessed it – Neil Diamond.
In this case, those two wolves are – who else? – Neil Diamond and Neil Diamond. One is Neil–Now, an aging rocker grappling with unresolved trauma and a misleadingly snazzy songbook. He knows his legacy can be reduced to a single song, in which good times never seemed so good; but he also knows that, for the sake of his family, he needs to emerge from the manic-depressive fog that’s hung over him since adolescence.
The other, gummier wolf is Neil–Then, a sequin-drenched megastar with a habit of treating his (three!) wives poorly. Onstage, Neil-Then is showy, confident and young; behind the scenes, he’s a mopey narcissist, a self-absorbed Eeyore in star-spangled fringe.
Over the last two years, Mirvish has offered audiences a sampler of high-budget jukebox musicals: Most of them (with the exception of & Juliet) have chafed against the edges of good taste. Just For One Day was a superficial scrape at the logistics of Live Aid; MJ explored the inner psyche of Michael Jackson (or, well, the parts of it allowed by Jackson’s estate). I still haven’t recovered from We Will Rock You, the nonsensical Queen musical about the perils of big tech.
Every second is a highlight in Mirvish’s all-Canadian & Juliet
A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, isn’t as torturous as We Will Rock You. And, to its credit, it’s more biographically rigorous than MJ: Unlike Jackson, Diamond doesn’t escape his musical with an unscathed reputation. In fact, he appears wildly unlikeable in places.
Even so, A Beautiful Noise is yet another project, structured around the catalogue of a popular artist, in which the story being told – the raison d’être for a theatre show – comes third to the music and atmosphere.
As such, it hits nearly every trope on the jukebox musical bingo card: An underwritten third-party character – the therapist, in this case, played by Lisa Reneé Pitts – asks Diamond to sing through his body of work for no particular reason. Songs are shoehorned into narrative contexts – Song Sung Blue occurs when Diamond starts to feel, ahem, blue – and seem to anticipate audience delight within their first few bars.
And, of course, the bread and butter of post-Mamma Mia jukebox fare: Flashy dance numbers, particularly in the second act, ditch the story altogether, embracing a cover-band joie de vivre that almost makes you wonder why the show wasn’t just conceived as a tribute act in the first place.
We Will Rock You is a bad case of Freddie Mercury-poisoning
An added hazard in this one: Your love of Sweet Caroline ought to verge on fanatical before stepping into the theatre. Otherwise, A Beautiful Noise will start to feel tedious long before the end of the first act. If you go, sharpen your bah-bah-bahs – like a soldier waiting to be drafted, you will be called upon to demonstrate your bar-song savvy.
Again, the show’s not terrible. If you’re a Diamond fan, you’ll have a nice, if unchallenging, time.
But Anthony McCarten’s writing feels like such an exercise in box-ticking that the better work happening onstage feels a bit pointless: Mary Page Nance is tremendous as Marcia Murphey, Diamond’s second wife and a major driver of the action in the show, but she’s reduced to a sparkle-clad ghost halfway through the second act. Spencer Donovan Jones offers a lovely rendition of Shilo, about Diamond’s imaginary friend, toward the end of Diamond’s therapy session – but who is he playing? Another iteration of Diamond? It’s never clear.
Robert Westenberg’s Neil–Now is gruff; self-deprecating; haunted. Westenberg injects the role with more depth than exists on the page – as in the therapist’s “two wolves” remark, the script sags with clichés – and while his singing in the second act errs toward pitchy, his acting generally elevates McCarten’s dialogue.
Nick Fradiani, Neil–Then, is musically excellent, a firework of energy who lives up to the bombastic sparkle of Emilio Sosa’s costumes. He’s the reason to see the show, if there is one, even if he doesn’t get much of a chance to make the younger iteration of Diamond seem like more than an opportunistic scoundrel. But when Fradiani sings, you almost forget the trail of wives his character left on the way to eternal fame.
Director Michael Mayer conjures a few compelling images – hands touching hands, mostly, in Steven Hoggett’s exuberant choreography – but the second act droops when Neil–Now, growing antsy in his standard-issue therapy recliner, begins to steer the action. (Indeed, past the 90-minute mark, there is little.) A sequence exploring why Diamond is so sad – after some dithering, the show points fingers at an unhappy childhood – rings hollow when bookended by tracks about the glitz and glee of being alive.
After a season of sitting through jukebox musicals – some OK, most cloying – I’m starting to feel a little like Neil–Now. I’ve grown accustomed to being the grouch in the room, the yum-yucker wishing for more meaningful work on Toronto’s largest commercial stages. I hope, someday soon, to join the chorus of “so good!”s I heard upon exiting the theatre of A Beautiful Noise. But I guess, for now, it’s the grumpier of the two wolves inside me that’s calling the shots.