Review: A BEAUTIFUL NOISE: THE NEIL DIAMOND MUSICAL at Providence Performing Art Center

The National Tour of "A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical" kicked off last night at the Providence Performing Arts Center with the crowd eating up the classics like "Sweet Caroline", "Cracklin' Rosie" and "Forever in Blue Jeans" to name a scant few.

American Idol's 2015 winner and Broadway Star Nick Fradiani played a spectacular Neil Diamond.  Let's face it, Diamond's gravelly voice is hard to replicate but Fradiani gets as close as anyone ever could.  The moment for me when Fradiani really captured the Diamond tone was in his duet with the remarkable Hannah Jewel Kohn, who played his second wife Marcia, in the haunting "You Don't Bring Me Flowers".

When the curtain fades away in these kinds of musicals, you typically get bombarded with color, energy and motion but with "A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical", it starts amostly empty stage with just two chairs.  You see an older Diamond, played by Robert Westenberg, telling his life story to his doctor, played by Lisa Renee Pitts. The one thing you realize almost immediately is Diamond is just like us, a human, who makes mistakes. Plenty of them.  But the conversations they have set the stage for the musical numbers and you learn some great history lessons along the way from the behind-the-scenes work on one of his first songs "I'll Come Running" to one of his first big hits that was handed to the Monkees in "I'm a Believer".   Seeing the success of the bands that he was writing songs for, Diamond started realizing all his hard work was giving other musicians fame when it should be for him.  His music producer Ellie Greenwich, played by Kate A. Mulligan, who Diamond solely credited with his eventual success, told him he should be singing his own songs.  "You have a voice like you woke up and kicked over an ashtray," she told Diamond.  It was the rarest of voices and he should use it to his benefit.

And from then on, he did.  

Every step along the way, Diamond was learning.  When a bar owner told him his songs were a little dark, he came back with that energetic and gleeful "Cracklin' Rosie".  When he couldn't come up with the third song for his new record label due in an hour, he miraculously pulled "Sweet Caroline" out of the clouds.

But even when he hit all his number ones and played to sell-out crowds all over the world, there was still something missing.  "Loneliness is always so prevalent in your lyrics" said his doctor, who asked him to switch chairs to change his perspective on his life and more importantly, his youth.  Diamond had realized that throughout his life, through all the success, he had never stopped running.  And it was time he stopped and savored.  Which gave us one of Diamond's most incredibly stirring songs, "I am...I Said"

"A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical" is a near-perfect stroll down memory lane for many of us, a reunification of the songs that made us during times we needed them the most.  The production features a remarkable 29 of Diamond's best hits.  We may have been robbed of seeing Diamond, 83, ever play again with his 2018 Parkinson's Diagnosis, but this musical brings it all back.  You'll marvel at how incredible Fradiani is as Diamond, "Play Me" was a close second to "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" in how Fradiani mastered the Diamond tone.  But you'll also love Diamond's journey to stardom and how money isn't everything.  Sometimes, we all have to stop running one day.  And Diamond didn't learn that lesson too late, which gives all of us hope.  

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