Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Our next guest, Will Swenson stars on Broadway as a flat bush raise boy turned Rock and Roll Hall of Famer; Neil Diamond. The show is called A Beautiful Noise, and it's full of Diamond's classics, with that extra layer of Broadway vocal prowess. Songs like Cherry, Cherry, and Cracklin Rosie and, of course--

Neil Diamond: [singing] Hands, touching hands

Reaching out, touching me, touching you

Sweet Caroline

Good times never seemed so good

Alison: So good, so good, I can't help. A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical opens with the present-day Neil Diamond in therapy. At first, he's reluctant to open up and explore the dark clouds of self-doubt that we learn to follow him his whole career, but when his therapist brings in a complete Neil Diamond songbook, which notes his accomplishments like 40 top 40 hits; 120 million albums sold, it prompts memories and flashbacks that come flowing from his lyrics.

In those memories spanning Diamonds performing career from his early hits for the Monkees to his Elvis-level stardom, Diamond is played by Broadway star Will Swenson, most recently seen at Classic Stage Company in Assassins. Swensons performance in A Beautiful Noise captures Diamond's insecurities, as well as his vocals, which one character describes as "gravel wrapped in velvet like you just woke up and tripped over an ashtray."

A Beautiful Noise is one of the many shows participating in this Broadway week, two-for-one ticket deal for performances through mid-February. Joining me now to talk about the show is Will Swenson. Will, nice to meet you.

Will Swenson: You, too. Nice to meet you, Alison.

Alison: You said that Neil Diamond was your dad's favorite singer of all time, what was the first memory of hearing Neil Diamond?

Will: [chuckles] It's true. Literally, maybe even my first musical memory of any kind was a Neil Diamond one. We were moving from Colorado to California, and I remember my dad had this suburban van. He had an eight-track tape player in it, and I remember listening to Hot August Night driving through the desert, and that's when I was maybe three or four years old.

Alison: Had you ever seen him live before the show?

Will: Yes, I'd seen him in concert a couple of times. Just because he's part of the fabric of my family. My dad loves him so much that he was constantly on in the house, and we all kind of love Neil.

Alison: When did you start appreciating him as a songwriter and an artist, as someone who you sing as part of your living, as part of what you do professionally?

Will: Because I knew his stuff so well when I was in middle school and trying to get attention from girls, I learned a couple of Neil Diamond songs on the guitar, and I would play those to try to woo girls. I think I appreciate it then.

Alison: It always starts that way. I understand that you had to audition in front of Neil Diamond. First of all, what did you think when that was presented to you?

Will: Well, I was asked to do a reading of the thing. At the time, I didn't realize that Neil Diamond was going to come watch it and give his approval or not. I was excited to do the project, but then they were like, "Well, Neil is going to come watch it, and tell us what he thinks." Then it became kind of instant panic mode, and it was one of the more surreal experiences my entire life.

Alison: What did you sing?

Will: We did the whole show.

Alison: You did the whole show in front of Neil Diamond.

Will: Yes, we did the whole show as a version of-- It's far from what the show ended up being, but as the show was in development, it was a pass at the show and what songs we wanted to use and roughly the story in the book. I sang all 20 whatever songs that I ended up singing in the show. It was bizarre to do it in front of him. He was 10 feet away. It was a trip. He started out with his eyes kind of closed, and I was like, "Oh, are we boring him because he falling asleep?" I think he was just channeling it.

Then eventually, he started nodding his head and then when we got to some of the more upbeat songs, he started singing along and we were like, "Okay, well, looks like maybe he's on board."

Alison: This is going to fly. My guest, Will Swenson, A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical is on Broadway now. You've played real figures before, your last role was as Charles Guiteau in Assassins. You were great, by the way, in a small theater on 13th Street. That's right. When you're thinking about playing a real person, whether it is an assassin or an incredibly well-known singer, how do you start when you're playing somebody real? How do you start your research?

Will: It's different. It's different for each thing. For example with Guiteau, there's lots of books about him and kind of historical stuff, but you don't have that tangible, you don't have YouTube. For Guiteau, I dug in and read a bunch of biographies and historical angles on who he was or might have been, and that was helpful. Then the show is a different version of Guiteau, so you have to marry the writer's version of who he is, with who he actually was.

Then with Neil, it's a much more literal representation of who he is, but I've got the luxury of YouTube, and there's just millions of hours of footage to watch him and check out his mannerisms, and his deliveries, and his sound, and his movements, so it helps out a lot.

Alison: How did you work with your director, so that you are playing the part of Neil Diamond versus doing a Neil Diamond impression?

Will: That's the trick, isn't it? Yes, it's tricky. I think there's the impulse sometimes to do-- Every singer has his own sound and eccentricities, and there have been shows on Broadway with performers who have very pronounced eccentricities like a Cher, or a Tina Turner, or a Billie Holiday for that matter, and Neil has his own specific sound. I think there's the impulse or at least the danger may be of overdoing those eccentricities, so that becomes sort of a caricature. For my money, it ends up being about, "Oh, look, he's producing this sound," but sometimes those can go too far.

You really wanted to be faced centered on the story and who the person is, and not get lost in, "Oh, look at this actor and making a sound that sounds so much or like this performer, or even more so than this performer." It's a tricky balance I think for my tastes and money, as long as the story and the character are forefront. As long as you're representing in a strong way to the character's sounds, then that's where you win, but it's tricky. It's just tricky.

Alison: My guest, Will Swenson, we're talking about A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical. The main conflict is between Neil Diamond and himself. He has all this talent, good fortune, but he talks about, "dark clouds that come when he's not performing on stage." When you first read the whole script, and you read the book part, what struck you about the story?

Will: I love the structure of it. I love that it was really vulnerable. With a songbook musical, it would be really easy to turn it into a concert evening, just tell his story and do his songs, but this show starts out really untraditionally in its structure and bounces around in time, and because it's told, in memory, it's very much like a memory play. Sometimes things are versions of Neil's life that he's sort of told himself and the therapist calls him on that, and says, "Is that really how it was?" Then he has to get honest about it, and then there's another version of how that went down, maybe a more truthful version of how it went down.

Really, what struck me was the structure of the thing, and the idea behind the therapy really allowed for emotional exploration. Then the fact that there's two Neils at the same time is really cool and deep. There's an older version of a man looking back on his life and having to come to terms with his decisions and wishing he could change some of them. For two of us to be existing in the same character at the same time, open certain doors that are cool to play with on stage. I just think there's a lot going on that's really appealing.

Alison: Was there anything about that vulnerable part of Neil Diamond's psyche that you could relate to personally as a performer?

Will: Oh, 100%. All actors, I think, we've all got impostor syndrome. We all want to succeed, we all want to be at the top of that performing mountain, and our profession is fraught with rejection on a daily basis almost, so you super get it. Our version of this story is Neil, dealing with the fact that he can't perform anymore and having to reconcile this piece of his life that he can't connect to anymore, the thing that he identified with and that brought him joy, and he doesn't have that piece of himself anymore, and having just come through a global pandemic, where all of us theatre actors were unable to touch that thing that we loved and that piece of us where we express ourselves. It felt like a very interesting parallel and something I super related to.

Alison: Everyone knows Sweet Caroline, but a lot of folks don't know that Neil Diamond wrote all of these other huge hits, I'm a Believer, Red Red Wine. Let's listen to a little bit of I'm a Believer from the cast album of A Beautiful Noise.

Speakers: [singing] Then I saw her face

Now I'm a believer

Not a trace of doubt in my mind

I'm in love

And I'm a believer

I couldn't leave her if I tried

Not if I tried

I thought love was more or less a giving thing

Seems the more I gave the less I got

What's the use in trying

All you get is pain

When I needed sunshine I got rain

Alison: One of the things I really have been digging in the past couple of years with musicals that have songs that we know, whether it's and Juliet or Neil Diamond, the musical, is when you hear pop songs sung by really beautifully trained voices, I think you hear more of the songcraft. I do. I think you hear more of the songcraft when you hear it sung in a way by people who have extraordinary pipes. I just do, I like listening to the craftsmanship of the songs. Do you have a favorite Neil Diamond song that's not one of the obvious ones?

Will: I think mine are not so obvious. Well, maybe Solitary Man is obvious. I love performing Solitary Man because it's so simple and it's such a personal song to Neil. The flip side of that is I really love doing Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show because it's just the polar opposite. It's just the ultimate Neil Diamond showstopper revival gospel. Huge, huge band, huge number, huge sound, sequins in lights. It's great.

Alison: We have it queued up. Let's take a look. [laughs]

Will: Excellent. [laughs]

[music]

[singing] The room gets suddenly still and you could almost bet

You can hear yourself sweat, he walks in

Eyes black as coal and when he lifts his face

Every eye in the place is on him

Starting soft and slow, like a small earthquake

And when he lets it go, we have the palace shakes

It's love, brother love

Say brother loves traveling salvation show

Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies

'Cause everyone goes

'Cause everyone knows, brother loves show

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Brothers

Alison: That's Will Swenson from A Beautiful Noise. How do you take care of your voice? [laughs] You sing so much in a show.

Will: [laughs] Yes, I do. Funny that you'd asked me that question after that particular song because it's so gravelly. It's tricky. It's literally one of the things that I talked with Neil himself about, one of the first questions he asked me was how are you taking care of your voice? I said, "Well, I should ask you the same question. How did you get through all those years of your gravelly sound?" He said, "Well, got to hydrate and make sure the sound is good and get lots of sleep and all those things that your voice teacher tells you over the years."

It's tricky. When we did the show out of town in Boston this last summer, I did all eight shows and it was just a little too much to do eight. Two in a day is really, really hard. We paired it back to seven. I do one a night until the weekend, and then I do two on Saturday and one on Sunday. I do seven shows a week, and have a great standby Nick Fradiani, who does the Wednesday night shows, and that seems to be doing the trick. I'm just slipping in under the wire each week.

Alison: What was interesting to you about getting that voice right? It still sounds like you, but it's definitely Neil Diamond, sounds like Neil Diamond, too.

Will: I don't know. It's tricky. I feel like he and I have a similar baritone naturally. I feel like his gravel is just his sound and it just comes naturally. That's what comes out when he sings, and that's not the case with me. It was a lot of experimentation with trying to be gravelly and then finding the right voice teacher to teach me how to set up my, this is very performary to say, but my instruments, but how to not injure yourself while making that gritty sound. It's just been a process and hopefully, I'm getting close to it.

Alison: On top of singing, obviously you have to act as well, which means you have a physical performance. When Neil's having self-doubt, you hunch a little bit, you stumble over your words, you don't smile nearly as much. What did you want to get across to the audience about Neil in this moment?

Will: Just that it's a journey. He's very much an introvert in real life, and apparently, always has been. You think of Neil Diamond as this consummate performer and this huge energy because that's what we've come to know him as on stage. In real life, he's very soft-spoken and quiet. It was a journey for him, I think, to find that piece of himself that eventually became this consummate performer, and dramatically, it leaves you somewhere to go as well. If he starts out as a confident cocky kid and ends up as a confident, successful grown-up that it's not that nice of a journey to watch.

I don't think I'm embellishing, I don't think the show embellishes on that. I think he started out as a humble Jewish kid from Brooklyn, who just wanted to write songs, never really thought of himself as a performer, and then somebody was like, your voice is really cool and unique and you should sing these songs instead of selling them to the Monkees or whomever he was selling them to. Yes, I think it's part of the journey.

Alison: How did you think about his Judaism being part of the show, and why is that important when you play your version of Neil Diamond?

Will: Well, specificity is just the golden ticket with all theater and performing. It's a part of who he is. I think he would agree that maybe it's a piece of him back in the day that he wanted to bury to a certain extent. I don't think he was ever trying to hide out as non-Jewish, but I think it was a time where people wanted to be seen in a mainstream light and he wanted to change his name. It was always his roots and where he came from. Sure, when I was doing my homework, I certainly studied Flatbush and Judaism in the '60s to try to give me an idea of where he came from.

Over the years, I think he's become much more vocal and open about his Judaism and he's gone from having Christmas albums with no Jewish songs on them to Christmas albums with a few Jewish songs on them. [laughs]

Alison: This is Will Swenson. You're talking about Neil Diamond, A Beautiful Noise. I'm laughing when you came on the Zoom because we interviewed Audra McDonald's, your wife, in that room about a month ago for Ohio State Murders.

Will: This is a little setup. [laughs]

Alison: I recognize that backdrop. You guys interviewed each other for Entertainment Weekly, and Audra said, "We're both so exhausted because we're both working on shows, but because my show is a play, I don't have to sing and Will has to sing 975,000 songs each show, it's more important for him to get sleep right now than it is for me." How do you two help each other as professionals?

Will: Oh, God bless her. As with any hopefully functional relationship, you just got to know when to give and when to take. She's right, this show takes so much out of me vocally that one of the best things I can do is get some sleep. Most mornings, she gets up with our daughter and gets her off to school so I can sleep and it's endlessly helpful for me and I'm eternally grateful. Her show just closed, so maybe it won't be as taxing on her, I'm hoping.

At any rate, she's amazing and raising a six-year-old while both of us trying to scrap around and do our shows has been challenging to say the least, our poor daughter is at her wits end.

Alison: Neil Diamond is 81, officially retired after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. He went on the stage at the end of Beautiful Noises, opening night to perform Sweet Caroline. What was that like?

Will: It was incredible. The whole show is about him not being able to perform anymore. I'd say most people there knew that he's got Parkinson's and he hasn't been able to perform for five years and he hasn't publicly. They said it's a possibility that Neil might sing Sweet Caroline with us, for us, just feel it out. If he feels like he can do it, they're going to hand him a microphone. We weren't sure, we were prepared to do our version of it, but they handed him that mic and I think it was just so deep in his bones.

He sung that song so many thousands of times that he just stepped right into that again and started singing. It just blew the roof off of the theater and everyone just cried because it was the representation of what we had just watched on stage. It was incredible.

Alison: A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical is on Broadway now. I've been speaking with Will Swenson. Will, thank you for being with us. Go save your voice.

Will: [laughs] It's my pleasure. It's nice to talk to you, Alison.

 

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