NEW YORK — At their best, biographical jukebox shows like “A Beautiful Noise” dangle immortality, eight times a week. And not just for the audience.
The star subjects — in this case, Neil Diamond, who has sold more than 130 million records — are usually past their peak and no long selling out stadiums. But they get to see an attractive, youthful, virile actor — in this case, the fabulous Will Swenson — encapsulate them in all their swaggering glory, hitting all the high notes, smashing out their hits and often performing them with a technical competence and emotional integrity that matches or even exceeds the originator.
And the audience? They get to buy their tickets and be young again too, remembering concerts where they swayed to “Song Sung Blue,” imbibed to “Sweet Caroline,” seduced to “Red, Red Wine,” sniffled to “Love On the Rocks” or felt a young soul stirred by “Play Me,” not yet understanding what it really is like to get played in life.
The key to achieving this nirvana is first to ensure that the star in question has a broad, diverse repertory that became the soundtrack to the key moments of life. So achieved here. Diamond wrote plenty of songs that people have forgotten he penned (some recorded by other artists). And lots more folks now remember “Sweet Caroline” playing at their wedding. The second rule is the Bob Gaudio “Jersey Boys” rule: to insist that those songs sound exactly as the audience remember them, not some arty re-creation by an overachieving orchestrator.
All of that is very much in place in “A Beautiful Noise,” meaning that the show will, for most audiences if not as much for some critics, overcome the No. 1 problem that these shows invariably face: the lives of superstars tend to have all the same problems.
Those problems are all very much present in Anthony McCarten’s book, including the journey through three different wives. Jessie Fisher poignantly plays Jaye Posner, Robyn Hurder has a relatively big role as longtime wife Marcia Murphy, while Diamond’s third wife, Katie, is unseen but spoken of in redemptive terms and with the implication that this show was all her idea.
As is usual, the star takes the blame. The road family becomes the family, stardom becomes loneliness, yada, yada, as seen in “Jersey Boys” and points far beyond. There’s the producer type who unlocks the star’s journey (Bri Sudia, with a charmingly whimsical touch) and the bad record-label people, here a couple of mobster types played by Tom Alan Robbins and Michael McCormick, who ran one of Diamond’s early labels.
But to its credit, as directed with care by Michael Meyer, “A Beautiful Noise” also comes with some fresh ideas, not the least of which is Steven Hoggett’s choreography, a kind of postmodern tribute to the retro 1970s movement stylings of the likes of Pan’s People in the U.K. or Up with People on this side of the Atlantic. It’s far from traditional Broadway movement and happily so: it won’t be all for tastes, but I enjoyed the way Hoggett works with the “vocal designer,” AnnMarie Milazzo, to really physically pop the pa, pa, pa’s in “Sweet Caroline” and to play with the show’s central theme, that the Diamond catalog was a beautiful noise constantly playing in the creator’s head and needing to be resolved.
The self-aware framing device has an elder version of Diamond (played with emotional intensity by Mark Jacoby) talking to a kind of therapist (played by Linda Powell), trying to sort out his own identity and reconcile the end of his concert career. Much of that has to do with his rediscovering that he is “Neil, from Brooklyn,” the son of Jewish immigrants. The delayed revelation is a stretch given that Diamond actually was writing about his identity early in his career, but it gives the show a way to end outside of the usual reunion concert or Hall of Fame induction. And Jacoby gives the piece emotional oomph, combining with Swenson’s bravura vitality.
And that’s pretty much all you can reasonably expect of a piece like this, especially when combined with a huge set from David Rockwell that very cleverly denotes enigma, above all else.
Diamond’s career was long enough to encompass several genres and the visuals smartly see that as an excuse to trot through the gasping last decades of the 20th century, warts, forgotten fun and all. Diamond was a kind of talisman and his music, filled with his signature blend of macho groan and sweet melodiousness, is complex enough to stand a show like this. The piece will, I think, be a box office hit. Guys will agree to go when their partners buy a ticket and all will leave feeling like they went back for a while to a few nicer September morns than we usually get these days.
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At the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44 St., New York; abeautifulnoisethemusical.com.
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