Review: THE NEIL DIAMOND MUSICAL A BEAUTIFUL NOISE at Broadway San Jose

If you’re walking into A Beautiful Noise expecting a jukebox concert of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits, let me reassure you right away: the show absolutely delivers on that promise. The audience claps, sings along, and by the end is fully on its feet.

But the surprise, and the reason this musical lingers long after the final bow, is not the spectacle. It’s the story beneath the songs.

This Broadway San Jose production, playing now through January 4th, once again reveals A Beautiful Noise to be less a nostalgia trip than a deeply human portrait of a man who spent much of his life wrestling with depression, generational trauma, and a sadness he simply called “the cloud.”

The show is framed as a series of therapy sessions between an older Neil Diamond (Robert Westenberg, quietly devastating as Neil–Now) and his therapist (Lisa Reneé Pitts, compassionate, grounded, and wonderfully restrained). This framing device, conceived by playwright Anthony McCarten in collaboration with Diamond himself, is especially powerful when you remember that Neil came of age long before therapy was normalized or even encouraged, particularly for men.

In the show, Neil is grappling not only with his lifelong depression but also with Parkinson’s disease and the loss of his performing career. Watching him struggle to articulate feelings he’s spent decades turning into melody is both painful and illuminating. Music, for Neil, is what feelings sound like.

When his therapist admits she doesn’t really know his songs and begins to read his lyrics aloud, something cracks open. From that moment, the stage fills with The Beautiful Noise ensemble, and the musical becomes what it truly is: a choral excavation of a life.

The opening medley begins with “Song Sung Blue,” a deceptively cheerful tune whose lyrics, on closer inspection, tell us everything we need to know about the sadness underneath. It’s a brilliant choice, and in retrospect, it could have served as the musical’s subtitle.

Nick Fradiani, as Neil–Then, is nothing short of extraordinary. His performance captures Diamond’s ambition, vulnerability, and unmistakable vocal texture with uncanny precision. More importantly, he lets us see the emotional cost of becoming Neil Diamond. This is not an imitation; it’s an inhabitation.

That emotional inheritance is deepened by the portrayal of Neil’s parents, Rose and Kieve Diamond, whose presence quietly shapes the entire story. Heidi Kettenring, as Rose Diamond, brings a restrained warmth and watchfulness to the role, while Michael Accardo, as Kieve Diamond, embodies a father marked by restraint, survival, and unspoken history. Together, they powerfully suggest the generational trauma carried by Jewish families shaped by displacement, loss, and the constant pressure to endure. Their performances make it clear that Neil’s “cloud” did not emerge in isolation.

The show traces Neil’s early days at Greenwich Village’s Bitter End, a fitting birthplace for a songwriter whose work so often balanced longing and hope. His first wife, Jaye Posner (Tiffany Tatreau), is portrayed with warmth and clarity, especially as she navigates marriage, motherhood, and a husband already slipping away into his music.

Marcia Murphey, who would become his second wife, is beautifully played by Mary Page Nance, whose performance brings emotional intelligence, steadiness, and depth to a relationship that is both loving and ultimately heartbreaking. Their scenes together illuminate how even genuine love can falter when pain goes unaddressed.

One moment in this production landed very differently than it did when I first saw A Beautiful Noise last year: the song “America.”

In the present moment, with immigrants being deported without due process, brown people detained in outdoor prisons, families separated, and individuals disappeared into detention facilities and foreign prisons, the song no longer reads as aspirational. Instead, it feels hollow. Vacuous. Almost painfully ironic.

The myth of America, so powerfully symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, feels like a beautiful balloon that has finally burst. 

And the truth is, it was never quite true. 

Japanese Americans were illegally imprisoned during World War II and stripped of their homes and businesses. Angel Island processed Asian immigrants through suspicion and cruelty. The Chinese Exclusion Act codified racial exclusion into law. The Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s forcibly removed U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.

All of that history seemed to gather in the theater last night, making “America” ring not triumphant, but tragic. A song about hope colliding with a country that has repeatedly failed to live up to its own promises.

And yet the new tension of the song, America, fits well in the show because Neil Diamond’s music has always existed at the intersection of yearning and disillusionment.

What this musical does especially well is connect Neil’s depression to generational trauma. His parents carried the weight of historical catastrophe, survival, and silence, and that inherited grief finds its way into his music. Long before we had language for trauma, it was already being transmitted.

Neil’s “cloud” is not just personal. It’s ancestral.

Songs like “I Am… I Said” and even the buoyant “Song Sung Blue” reveal a man trying to name his loneliness in a culture that rewarded productivity but discouraged emotional honesty.

The show’s most cathartic moment comes when Neil–Then and Neil–Now sing together, collapsing time and self into one aching, beautiful reckoning. Around me, audience members wiped away tears. It felt communal, almost ritualistic.

And then, just as the show promises, it ends on a high note.

“Holly Holy” washes over the theater like a benediction. And when the cast launches into “Sweet Caroline,” the audience doesn’t just clap, they sing. Loudly. Joyfully. Without irony.

In that moment, the sadness doesn’t disappear, but it’s held. Shared. Transformed.

A Beautiful Noise reminds us that music doesn’t fix what’s broken, but it can tell the truth about it. And sometimes that truth is enough to bring a room full of strangers to their feet, singing together at the top of their lungs.

And that, in the end, is its own kind of healing.

San Francisco / Bay Area Awards - Live Stats

Best Musical - Top 3

1. URINETOWN (Ghostlight Theatre Ensemble)

22% of votes

2. BEAUTIFUL (Transcendence Theatre Company)

8.9% of votes

3. SWEENEY TODD (Cabrillo Stage)

7.5% of votes

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