As a fifth grader when “Song Sung Blue” became a hit in 1972, I didn’t know Neil Diamond from Neil Simon, but the song became an obsession. Its juxtaposition between major and minor chords — moving from happy to sad and back — fascinated me. The fingering of the song’s basic guitar chords remains embedded in my brain more than 40 years on.
“Song Sung Blue” comes up early in the dramatically mundane yet musically glorious “A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical,” running through Nov. 24 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. Herein, we learn Diamond wrote “Song Sung Blue” while in the throes of the chronic depression that gripped his life. The lyrics — “But when you take the blues and make a song/ You sing them out again” — are revealed as a prescription for excising pain via creativity. That’s some profundity for a four-chord pop tune.
The roughly 30 Diamond tunes packed into the musical sound fantastic in director Michael Mayer’s production. Anthony McCarten’s book, alas, plays like early draft of a badly written soap opera. This is a jukebox musical that would be far better minus about 95 percent of the dialogue.
There’s certainly enough music to carry the show. Diamond is a Grammy-winning, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who penned 39 albums and sold more than 120 million of them. Songs including “Sweet Caroline,” “Forever in Blue Jeans” and “Cracklin’ Rosie” became earworm hits that helped define the pop landscape from the late 1960s through the 1980s.
“Beautiful Noise” uses a similar device as the recent Tina Turner and Michael Jackson bio-musicals, where multiple versions of each singer tell the story. “Neil Then” (played by 2015 “American Idol” winner Nick Fradiani) covers Diamond’s early and spandex-and-sparkles hit-making/arena tour years. “Neil Now” (Robert Westenberg) is a greying, nondescript man in a psychiatrist’s office dealing, reluctantly analyzing his songs with a determined Doctor (Lisa Renee Pits).
Framed by Neil Now’s psychiatric sessions, the book offers up the bullet points of Diamond’s personal and professional life with dialogue simultaneously perfunctory and leaden. The plot, which doesn’t have an arc so much as a small mound, is centered on Diamond’s trouble with “clouds,” a euphemism he uses for chronic, recurring depression. The clouds lift when Diamond is performing for adoring crowds, but once the show is over, he’s left a solitary man.
Featuring a live orchestra (musical supervision and arrangements by Sonny Paladino) and an ensemble dubbed “The Noise,” the production boasts killer vocals from the cast and resplendent choreography from Steven Hoggett.
Fradiani has a gravel-over-whiskey-draped-in-velvet baritone that’s positively luscious; “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” is electrifying. “Love on the Rocks” is heartbreaking. But acting is not Fradiani’s forte. When not in song, he’s as wooden as an old picnic table, saddled with dialogue laden with cheese enough for a picnic.
Westenberg’s Neil Now fares slightly better, but he seemed to be in vocal distress opening night, shouting rather than belting through some of his biggest musical moments.
There’s plenty to enjoy regardless.
“Cherry, Cherry” features a dance solo from Hannah Jewel Kohn, who is incandescent as Diamond’s second wife, Marcia Murphey. The energy of the music is off the charts, and Hoggett’s choreography as channeled through Kohn has a firepower reminiscent of the iconic “Music and the Mirror” dance solo from “A Chorus Line.”
“Sweet Caroline” turns — of course — into a sing-along, with The Noise serving up an ebullient “Up with People” vibe that pulls the audience in. Whether the song was written for 12-year-old Caroline Kennedy or not, it’s a sure-fire crowd-pleaser.
The most powerful number of the night is the defiant “I Am…I said,” an affirmation to end all affirmations. The number shows Diamond, both Then and Now iterations, taking stock of his life — the good, the bad and the cloud-covered — and consciously deciding to embrace it with all the zeal he can muster, both the days of shrouded darkness and those of sunshine.
David Rockwell’s set design renders the Cadillac Palace stage a giant, abstract guitar, luminous strings stretching up to the flyspace, while Kevin Adams’ kaleidoscopic light design creates a chaotic carnival aesthetic.
In all “A Beautiful Noise” lives up to its name, at least musically. The noise is beautiful indeed. The rest of the production is memorable only for its clunking mundanity.