A 'Diamond' is forever

Hannah Jewel Kohn was born a generation or two after Neil Diamond’s greatest songs hit their airwaves, but the 30-year-old stage actress has vivid childhood memories of his iconic number “Sweet Caroline,” which he wrote in less than an hour in a Memphis hotel room in 1969.

At many of the B’nai Mitzvah celebrations she attended in the early 2000s in and around West Bloomfield, Michigan, the heavily Jewish Detroit suburb in which she and her four siblings grew up, “the adults rushed onto the dance floor” when the band started up “Caroline,” Kohn recalled.

Little did Kohn know then that she’d play Marcia Murphrey, Diamond’s second wife, for whom “Caroline” was composed, in the road show of the biographical ” A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical ,” which returns to Chicago for a second run this month.

Last year, when Beautiful Noise made its initial landing in the Windy City, Chicago Sun-Times critic Catey Sullivan called Kohn’s performance “incandescent,” citing her dance solo during the show’s rendition of “Cherry, Cherry.”

The praise for Kohn, who grew up at West Bloomfield’s Temple Israel, is hard-won. “I feel I have a purpose outside of my everyday life,” she said, to serve the community through music, dance, and theater.

That sense of purpose started early-and runs in her blood. Her parents always loved the arts and encouraged her to pursue her dreams. She went to a homeschooling program for young actors, affiliated with the University of Michigan, and then immediately booked a national tour of Beauty and the Beast upon graduation.

Kohn noted that she is following in the path of one of her great-grandmothers, who was a vaudevillian, and that her younger sister, Lacey, is now on a similar trajectory, appearing in the national tour of the musical “Chicago.”

The family support, Kohn said, means the world to her. “My mother has seen A Beautiful Noise 37 times, but who’s counting?” she quipped.

The other person Kohn has been thrilled to have in the audience is the Brooklyn-born songwriter himself, the grandson of Polish- and Russian-born Jewish immigrants. Diamond, 84, whose other hits include “America,” “Sung Song Blue,” “Solitary Man,” “September Morn, and “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” has been living with Parkinson’s disease for a number of years. But that didn’t stop him from making a surprise appearance at the Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre during the run of Beautiful Noise this past summer. It was, for Kohn, an “an out-of-body experience,” she said. He led the audience in a sing-along of “Sweet Caroline,” the reaction to which, she added, “I can only compare to Taylor Swift” and the enthusiasm she elicits from her fan base.

Fellow co-star Robert Westenberg, who plays an older version of Neil Diamond in “Beautiful Noise”-a character parsing his life from the vantage of the therapist’s couch-has also been awestruck by audiences’ responses. “They’re waving their arms, they’re singing and dancing in the aisles,” said Westerberg, a veteran stage actor who won a Drama Desk Award and Tony nomination for work in the original Broadway production of Into the Woods ” in 1988. “They’re reliving their youth, or they’re discovering their youth.” To be able to bring joy to theatergoers, particularly during a time of heightened conflict throughout the world, he said, is a “blessing” and a “gift.”

Nick Fradiani, playing the younger version of Diamond, couldn’t agree more. It is both “humbling” and “very inspiring” to be able to bring to life both the music and the man behind the music-and to have win over the hearts of crowds at each performance.

“A Beautiful Noise,” a part of the Broadway in Chicago series, runs November 19 – 30 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph St.

Robert Nagler Miller is a journalist and editor who writes frequently about arts- and Jewish-related topics from his home in New York.