‘A Beautiful Noise’ musical sells out shows, drawing over 100,000 attendees

“A lot of the made pieces, her [Martin’s] team made them in Sydney, so it’s a really local Australian make, which is really special,” Allen says.

Touch-ups are also a constant throughout the show. Kelly Fratta, the deputy head of wardrobe, was working on rhinestoning a pair of boots for Swenson just moments before one of the performances. Allen estimates that there were nearly a thousand rhinestones on the one pair of boots alone.

“We get to do a lot of rhinestoning, Kelly’s doing some at the moment on a pair of the Neil Diamond boots,” Allen says when we visit.

Each rhinestone is stitched by hand, labour that generates thousands of hours of work for the wardrobe staff. For the backstage team, consistency from night to night is paramount. Whether it is ensuring Swenson’s tear-away pants rip down their intended seam on cue, or belts are not missed in a costume change, perfection is a non-negotiable.

With one costume change being as fast as 30 seconds, each moment is meticulously prepared. The process becomes second nature with thorough organisation and planning.

“Once you start getting through the technical process and you start doing it more and more times, it just becomes this perfect choreographed almost dance,” Allen says.

“The backstage choreography is just as intricate and interesting as what’s happening on stage.”

No costuming mishaps have taken place during the Melbourne shows – “knock on wood,” Allen says – but wardrobe still has to be prepared in case of any setbacks. Thinking on the fly and being ready for any situation is what keeps the peace. If swing performers, who step in when other performers are unavailable, take the stage, each individual has their own set of costumes and runs through staging at the same time as the main cast.

“The way the fastenings are, sometimes you might need to change those and just be able to alter them, but sometimes it just comes down to practice,” Allen says.

For Maddison Ohl, theatre isn’t about being in the spotlight or on the stage. Instead, you’ll find him backstage working on the technical scenic aspects of a show. And it has always been his passion.

“From the beginning, it was the only thing that I was ever going to do,” Ohl says.

As the head mechanist on A Beautiful Noise, his prime responsibility is installing, operating and maintaining staging equipment. He began planning for the show about a month before it opened.

His involvement in theatre started when he was still “in single digits”. After a year at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, he dropped out and went to work on numerous shows.

It’s the pressure that keeps him hooked. “There’s an urgency … once the show has started, and the pressure of making that work, despite circumstances,” Ohl says. “That is my closest addiction to it.”

Despite this, A Beautiful Noise is a bit of a break for him. The show is relatively light on reset, meaning there isn’t much for him to prepare for the next performance after the curtain comes down. He spends most of the show in the wings, keeping an eye on anything going on and off the stage, especially the physical set elements.

With the quick post-show routine, he gets the unique experience of being out the stage door before patrons have left, so he can sometimes hear what audiences think, which “is very rewarding”.

This isn’t always possible, though. He worked on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for two-and-a-half years, also at the Princess Theatre, which was a very different beast, including complicated set changes and tonnes of equipment.

Even from behind the scenes, he can still feel the energy the show generates. “You still do get fed backstage by the power of the audience and what they’re bringing to the room, and we have very keen audiences, which is great,” Ohl says.

What’s most important to him, especially in shows with a lot of moving parts, is mutual respect between everyone involved. With cast members pushing objects onto the stage and timing the tracks that move heavy or large set pieces, the backstage crew are often doing their own dance.

“The backstage choreography is very consistent if people are doing it well,” Ohl says. “If you start to slip on that, then the flow-on effects can start to mount up pretty quickly.”

He thinks the best way to create this consistency is through community.

“A lot of it is the rapport that you build in the company,” Ohl says. “We try to breed an environment of making everybody aware of what other departments are doing, so that they can help us keep those on the tracks.”

He says this show got lucky because many of those employed on it already knew each other, or had worked with the same cast members, before opening. He says there is a “mesh” on this one that made it easier to build community than in other shows he’s worked on.

Ohl is looking forward to the Sydney and Brisbane runs because shows at this scale often play the same theatres, which he says creates “a mini homecoming” for the theatre communities in each town.

As the curtain flies up in the second act, the audience finally lays eyes on the band making all that beautiful noise.

“You hear this roar come at you from the audience,” says music director Nigel Ubrihien. “It’s just this sort of wall of sound that goes whoosh at you … It’s honestly like a wave.”

The band’s stage presence immerses the audience in the show, blurring the line between watching a musical and experiencing a full-blown concert.

Ubrihien plays keyboard and leads eight other musicians with unwavering energy. He doesn’t miss a beat, flipping through the 300-plus page musical score with a swish that occasionally gets picked up by his microphone.

“There is a lot of multitasking,” Ubrihien says. Performing and conducting come automatically to him after doing the show nearly 60 times, so much so that he is able to write notes to other musicians while keeping in time with the actors.

“It does kind of do my head in a little bit,” Ubrihien says. “I think, ‘Oh, this is nutty.’ But sometimes you have to.”

The band becomes the backdrop to the second act, performing from a two-level structure at the back of the stage.

Out of the hundreds of Neil Diamond songs, the show features 25 that encapsulate not just the artist’s life, but the lives of those around him.

You Don’t Bring Me Flowers is sung as a heartbreaking exchange between Diamond and first wife Jaye Posner (Alana Tranter) and the smooth country sound of Forever in Blue Jeans is reimagined as a powerful solo by his second wife Marcia Murphey (Ashleigh Rubenach).

Ubrihien says that at its core, the musical’s songs “need to still be occupying his aural space”, meaning that even if they sound a bit different from the original, audiences should be able to recognise them.

In musical theatre, pre-existing songs will sometimes differ in orchestration, speed and structure because they serve a dramatic purpose, says Ubrihien. In this case, Diamond’s songs are generally slower than what audiences hear.

“The songs are like little bricks,” Ubrihien says. “You can have them as individual bricks as he would in an album, but in a theatrical context those bricks get stacked together and they build a house.”

Ubrihien has been directing music since the mid-1990s and says one of the most difficult parts of the job is learning the timing of different actors.

That sentiment was echoed by the audio operators at their booth in the back of the theatre.

Head of sound Anthony Shaw says that with repetition, the crew gets a feel for how particular actors like to play their roles; whether they prefer to take a dramatic pause or hold that last high note. When the entire cast changes for a technical rehearsal or a show, the pressure is on.

Deputy head of sound Niamh Sinclair says that sometimes her adrenaline starts pumping and doesn’t slow down until the final curtain.

During the technical rehearsal we sat in on, Sinclair ran point, adjusting for volume of the control groups while Shaw stepped in every once in a while to tweak treble and bass for different actors.

The goal is to keep the sound as smooth and consistent as possible for a pleasant listening experience, from the high-energy, hand-clapping gospel sound of Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show to Diamond’s brooding, emotional intensity in I Am … I Said.

The musical is fitting for the venue, where the seats come right up to the stage.

“The audience is never very far away from you,” Ubrihien says. “So you have such a beautiful intimacy with the audience in ... the Princess [Theatre], it’s a beautiful space to play.

“This is one of my favourite theatres in Australia. If I can see things here, I generally will come here because of the intimacy.”

During the encore, before the curtain falls, the audience finally gets to join in, and a venue-wide sing along ensues to the most iconic song in the Neil Diamond canon – Sweet Caroline.

Patrons rise to their feet and sway to the beat, some with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, as they close out the night loudly chanting the song’s signature refrain: “Bah bah bah!”

Ubrihien praises Diamond for “the way he writes these earworm bangers … they’re very simple, but, god, they’re perfect.”

A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical is at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre until November 7; Sydney’s Lyric Theatre from November 14; and Brisbane’s Lyric Theatre, QPAC from March 20, 2027.