Crawley: Neil Diamond show is "all about respect"

“And I get such a lovely response from the audiences. You see the people who have seen Neil Diamond 50-60 times and they're all sitting in the front row with their Neil Diamond T-shirts and they are loving it. Those are the people that you want to please and you get such a lovely reaction from them afterwards. I always think that as long as they're happy, then I'm doing something right. It is all about respect because the songs mean so much to these people. And you hear so many lovely stories from them when you talk to them after the show and hear why the songs are so important to them.”

Brooklyn brings his theatre show Hello Again: The Neil Diamond Songbook to The Hawth in Crawley on April 12; Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre on May 10 and Hastings' White Rock Theatre on October 4.

“It all started because I was singing around the pubs and clubs and people started telling me that I sounded like Neil Diamond. I didn't sing that many Neil Diamond songs at the time but I suppose it was just the tone of my voice. I never really picked up on it until people started telling me. And it just so happened that the show producers were looking for a guy to play Neil Diamond in the show, and I was playing in a small community pub where the show producers actually were.

“The show has been going for eight years now. We had a two-year break because of the pandemic so we're now really into our sixth year. We actually had a whole year of rehearsals when it was all Neil Diamond, everything Neil Diamond. I'd always been a Neil Diamond fan but not to the extent that I knew all the songs on every album so I had to really start learning but actually the hardest songs were the Neil Diamond songs that I was already doing because I'd been doing them in my own way!

“In the show I don't pretend to be him. I don't talk like him or put on a wig but it's all about the voice and the vibrato. And his voice has changed over the years. When you're doing the early, early stuff his voice obviously is much younger and then you are doing stuff from the shows from the 80s and 90s and the 2000s and he is certainly different. He puts a lot of different little phrases in. But fortunately I can manage to do both of them though I'm really trying to concentrate on the younger Neil Diamond. I had to work on some of the mannerisms and the way that he holds his guitar, and then you put on the sparkly shirt and the flares and you are there! And we get some really lovely reactions from people.”