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It’s a blustery Monday morning, and inside Opera Australia’s Southbank rehearsal studios, the cast and crew of A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical are starting their second week of rehearsals. About a dozen young dancers in exercise gear are working with associate choreographer Yasmine Lee, traversing the space in exaggerated, slow-motion movements. In the rehearsal space next door, associate director Austin Regan is giving notes to the cast as they run scenes.
The show opens with an elderly Diamond (Terence Crawford), talking to a psychologist about being depressed that his failing health – the singer was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018 – has put an end to his touring career. As he muses that songwriting gave him a ticket out of the working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood of Flatbush, the music changes, with the background piano chords suddenly turning into the instantly recognisable opening of Diamond’s 1967 hit, Shilo.
With the first preview about three weeks away, the cast members are fizzing with energy.
A Beautiful Noise would never have come about were it not for another musical biopic, Jersey Boys, the story of the Four Seasons – Frankie Valli, Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi and Bob Gaudio. When Gaudio, a friend of Diamond’s, left the Four Seasons, he became a record producer, producing some of Diamond’s biggest hits. A Beautiful Noise musical supervisor Sonny Paladino says: “Neil was a fan of Jersey Boys, and he saw it a bunch in New York. And one time he said to Bob afterwards, ‘Could I have one of these?’”
The answer was yes. But with 38 top 40 singles and 33 studio albums, winnowing down Diamond’s back catalogue for the show was a daunting task. “What makes this musical work so well is that there’s nothing superfluous,” Paladino says. “If the song is in the show, it has to be part of the show and make the audience care about what’s happening.
“Even in act two, we do a sequence that we call stadium medley, where he’s basically touring the world as he did, and even those songs are part of the narrative. There’s a great song called Heartlight, which we tried to get in there, but it just didn’t work.”
Plenty of songs did make the cut, though – there are 25 tracks on the soundtrack, and a few are medleys. The musical opened in Boston in 2022 and has been touring the US since. Audience members turn up in tour T-shirts, aware that this is the closest they will get to seeing the man himself perform.
“I think a lot of people are coming to see the show, particularly just to have like a Neil concert experience,” says Will Swenson, who plays Diamond as a young man and is the only import in the Australian cast. “It was weird for me to just go out, first notes out of my mouth and have the audience completely won over and happy and screaming, and it threw me.
“But I was like, ‘Oh, this is love for Neil, and I’m just this lucky guy that gets to be the recipient of all of this adoration.’ I will happily take it. But it’s a head trip to go like, ‘Oh wait, Will, you didn’t earn this. Neil earned this, and you are standing in his shoes to get to receive it.’
“Neil Diamond was my dad’s favourite singer of all time,” Swenson says. “I knew these songs when I was six years old.”
But if it’s one thing to perform these songs in front of 1200 Neil Diamond fans a night on Broadway, it’s very different performing them in front of the man himself, as Swenson did in a tiny room in Nashville.
“He just sat five feet away from me, and we played through the songs and read the script, just hoping that he would like it enough. It was one of the more surreal things I’ve ever done in my life. It was completely nerve-wracking, and luckily, about halfway through, he started raising his hand and started singing along and you’re like, ‘oh, I think he likes it’.”
Diamond isn’t the only one singing along. As anyone who has ever heard Sweet Caroline in a pub knows, it’s impossible not to join in the “ba ba ba!″s.
“We were careful crafting the show because it is a musical,” Regan says. “It’s not a concert, so we want people to be able to engage with the story and the play of it, but there are some moments where we know you have to release the pressure valve and let people sing along because how could you not with Song Sung Blue and with Sweet Caroline and all these songs? They’re iconic melodies, and you can’t help but join in.”
The show ran on Broadway for just under two years, where, as in Australia, musical theatre has struggled to find its feet after lockdowns. The New York Times reported late last year that only three musicals that had opened since the pandemic had made a profit. A Beautiful Noise was not one of them.
“We would have loved to have run longer, but I think we were all really, really proud that we got almost two years out of the show,” says Regan. “Most shows these days close after just a few months. It’s very, very hard to make a show work on Broadway, and I think of all the musicals in our season we ran the second longest of any production, which feels pretty great.”
Paladino puts the relatively short Broadway run down to timing, but points out that the US national tour found a huge audience. “If we [had] opened five years before the pandemic, we probably would have run for 10 years,” he says. “But then I think because of that, or in part because of that, the word had spread throughout the US. And again, the tour did really well, and I believe the tour here in Australia is going to do really well.”
Australian musical theatre has had its own set of challenges, with recent tour cancellations of big-budget shows hitting the industry hard. But Diamond always had a close relationship with Australia, having toured here seven times to sellout crowds.
“I think in this post-pandemic world, people want a sure thing,” says Paladino. “If they’re going to reach in their pockets and spend money, they want to make sure they’re going to have a great time.“
A Beautiful Noise is at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre from August 5 and Sydney Lyric from November 14.
