3 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Just because you're a pop star doesn't mean you deserve a musical
If 'A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical' were instead a Neil Diamond cover band, this review would be a qualified rave. And if all you care about in your jukebox musicals is persuasive covers of your favorite hits, sparkly costumes and bright lights, you can stop reading right now and go and have a wonderful time.
Star Nick Fradiani sounds frighteningly like the pop genius who gave us 'Sweet Caroline,' 'Solitary Man' and 'Cracklin' Rosie.' In the show, which opened Thursday, June 5, at BroadwaySF's Golden Gate Theatre, record producer Ellie Greenwich (Kate A. Mulligan) describes Diamond's voice as 'gravel wrapped in velvet,' or 'like you just woke up and tripped over an ashtray.'
Fradiani has that. His timbre is like an open range studded with tumbleweeds and barbed wire, cowboy ruggedness crossed with Flatbush grit, schmaltz with singed edges. And he knows just how to deploy it: when to purr, when to rawr, when to strum those vocal cords.
But 'A Beautiful Noise' attempts to be more than just a concert, and in so doing, it creates the clunkiest framing device and the least likeable protagonist possibly in the history of jukebox musicals.
The show has two Neils. Fradiani is Neil — Then, and Robert Westenberg is Neil — Now, who opens the musical seated silently across from his therapist (Lisa Reneé Pitts), who has purchased a Diamond songbook from which she can conveniently ask her aging client leading questions about what his lyrics really mean.
It's as exactly as indulgent and obvious as it sounds. Neil — Then is too stoic to open up, but then the appearance of the book magically snuffs out that flicker of tension. The therapist's questions — 'When did you start writing songs?' — lead to cliches that ChatGPT could write: 'I had music running through my head.'
Both Neils come across as sourpusses, leading other characters to pick on the younger version, with one nicknaming him Hamlet. The therapy setup, with Neil — Now and the shrink watching the flashbacks like bumps on a log, teases the possibility that eventually we'll get a deep, dark or at least dramatically interesting reason for all the gloom. Neil — Now's refusal to talk about his childhood for most of the show suggests it might have something to do with his parents.
But then when we finally meet them, all they have to say for themselves is 'We're Jews; of course we're anxious.' Childhood Neil has an imaginary friend to cope with the garden-variety angst. That's it. That's his whole reason for being morose and surly to everyone his whole life. But by the way, that's not why he's in therapy; it's that his health is failing and he can't perform any more. It's not a spoiler to reveal that, because the show's book, by Anthony McCarten, throws it in like an afterthought when it could have made for a much more effective mainspring.
So let's use this whole creaky contraption to ask what we, the theatergoing public and fans of the oldies station back when it still played '60s hits, get out of touring jukebox musicals. Sure, there are the high production values, the communion with fellow fans as we sing along to old favorites and the chance to measure the distance between our idols and their theatrical substitutes.
But a high-quality tribute band could offer all those pleasures without the baggage of a predictable narrative. So it must be something else that keeps us buying tickets. Maybe it's those Wikipedia factoids sprinkled in, like that the opening chords in 'Sweet Caroline' were a new progression in Diamond's oeuvre. Maybe we've worn out all our albums from repeat playing and crave hearing cherished tunes in new arrangements and narrative contexts.
Or maybe we hope that theater will be able to work its tools as an art form — just as Diamond fought for his right to write and record serious songs, not merely formulaic ones. But imagine if a supposedly new pop album could use only material that was preexisting, but that wasn't originally intended to be pop music. Or if all its words had to get approved by rich, powerful rights-holders whose heyday was decades ago before anyone could hear them.
Maybe you could still make great art under those constraints. But such shackles are heavy for creators in both the Billboard Hot 100 and musical theater.
