Talk about an oxymoronic title, especially for a musical.

Drawn from a 1976 Neil Diamond song title and applied to the whole arc of his life and career, “A Beautiful Noise” is a yoking worth pondering. A “noise,” of course, is an unpleasant sound, grating on the ears and generally the opposite of pleasant or appealing. But Diamond knows what he means. He’s first of all a songwriter — a Poet of the Poignant, a sad savorer of life’s contradictions; he’s secondarily a singer. As he says of the street sounds of his native Flatbush: “What a beautiful noise comin’ into my room and it’s beggin’ for me just to give it a tune.”

Diamond himself can no longer perform because of Parkinson’s disease, a fact mentioned in his prefatory Playbill letter dated 2022 but nowhere else in the show. His “last act” professionally, in addition to his legacy of recordings, is likely to be this cleverly wrought jukebox musical showing through Sunday at Norfolk’s Chrysler Hall.

The musical was written by New Zealander Anthony McCarten with direction by Michael Mayer. Steven Hoggett choreographed, though it’s clearly not meant to be a foot-forward dance show.

Diamond is not that famous for his musicianship. Having gotten his first guitar at 16, he founded his song empire on three chords, but they transmogrify and transcend the everyday when the arc of a life is intimated within the lyrics, and then gets further elaborated here by some onstage psychotherapy.

It isn’t easy getting Diamond to crack open and reveal his secrets. (His real family name, Diamond, refers, after all, to the hardest natural substance on Earth.) But with patience and stagecraft and simple revelations achieved by the efforts of shrink and patient, it all works surprisingly well.  

The stagecraft is minimal, especially in Act 1, but augmented by the occasional unexpected illusion. From behind the psychotherapist’s and patient’s chairs, chorus dancers emerge one by one, seemingly out of black nothingness (the Unconscious?) to join the duo. The trick is repeated later to equal audience puzzlement. Also amusing is the costume ratio of sequins to fabric, which increases incrementally but decisively as Diamond slowly succeeds.

But first let me clarify: There are actually two Neils: Neil-Now (played by slender, graying Robert Westenberg with a tough vulnerability and initial resistance to psychotherapy), and Neil-Then, the performing star of our show, played on Tuesday by standby actor Joe Caskey, whose voice is quite reminiscent of Diamond’s own “gravel wrapped in velvet,” a description from the show.

Setting old Neil (Westenberg) over and against his younger self (Caskey) offers tension and clever plotting points, skillfully built around Diamond’s own discography — 29 songs strong with a couple, “America” and “Sweet Caroline,” gleefully reprised by an audience that enthuses over and sings every expected “bomp, bomp, bomp” wedged between the lines and stanzas of the latter. This notorious earworm — now especially beloved from its use by sports teams — is simply irresistible, or, as people (even elderly critics) know to shout interstitially, it’s “so good, so good, so good!”

Such lively participatory drama from a mere song?

In another touring version of the show, Nick Fradiani as younger Neil, center, and the cast as The Noise. (Jeremy Daniel)

Yes, when it’s structured and performed by young actor Caskey. Once again, the first performance of the Nederlander production in Norfolk features a vital role taken by a stand-in, but at least, this time, there was slightly better lobby signage to warn the audience of the five cast substitutions, and Caskey has the skills to shine in the role. The patient-therapist trope doesn’t get too old — thanks to the skills of Westenberg as Neil-Now and Lisa Reneé Pitts as his friendly Freud (or jovial Jung) reincarnation. (Chrysler’s typically deficient warnings about stand-ins were noted this spring in this writer’s review of “Pretty Woman.”)

Neil-Now makes almost believable, hard-won progress in his psychological healing, a life blessed with children and the love of three different wives, two of whom are depicted in the show. There’s a moving duet between Diamond and his second wife, singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” There’s also a poignant duet late in the show between the old and young Neil on the song “I Am … I Said,” an existentialist hymn to the realization that life can be a lonely endeavor at any age, even among family and friends.

The secret of jukebox show success, however, is selecting real life moments to which one can pin hit songs.

We must travel with our hero from his beginnings, singing “Solitary Man” at The Bitter End on Bleecker Street, through his spats with recording companies (e.g., Bang Records), through romances, licit and illicit, as in “September Morn”: “We danced until the night became a brand new day. Two lovers playing scenes from some romantic play. September mornings still can make me feel that way.”

Diamond has his moments of political zeal: “Money talks. — But it don’t sing and dance, and it don’t walk.” With his true love (herself singing this anthem), he’s OK being “Forever in Blue Jeans” (with a touch of glitter). Diamond also waxes patriotic in his immigrants’ anthem “America.” “Brooklyn Roads” also celebrates immigrants. Diamond’s “Holly Holy” celebrates song as religious incantation, even mentioning a surely biblical “song of songs.”

But to my mind, Diamond remains the poet of lost love and sadness, from “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”: “I learned how to laugh, and I learned how to cry. Well, I learned how to love, and I learned how to lie. So you’d think I could learn how to tell you goodbye.”

Sing it now, Mr. Diamond.

May this Diamond be forever.

Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu

If you go

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Chrysler Hall, 215 St. Paul’s Blvd., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $61.95, which includes fees

Details: ticketmaster.com

https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/09/04/review-a-beautiful-noise-neil-diamond-musical/