MOLLY VANDENBERG
Staff Writer
Noah Diamond fell into the world of the Marx Brothers when he came across one of his parent’s books as a child, “Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo: A Celebration of the Marx Brothers and a Satire on the Rest of the World” by Joe Adamson.
Diamond couldn’t help but be mesmerized by their faces in the book. There was an air of similarity about them. To him, they fit in with the popular culture of The Muppets and Dr. Suess.
“I was in love with the idea of [the Marx Brothers] right away . . . Groucho’s face was both scary and fascinating. It really burned itself into my brain,” said Diamond.
As Diamond grew a bit older, he made it a personal mission to track down all of the Marx Brothers movies. He quickly went through his local libraries supply of books about the Marx Brothers. He just wanted to learn as much as he could. Over time, he’s fallen in love with the whole process of researching something you’re passionate about.
There’s not a history of show business in Diamond’s family, but theater was something that resonated with him immediately. His parents also made an effort to expose him and his younger siblings to different kinds of art.
“I always liked to . . . sing songs and tell stories,” said Diamond.
Another reason Diamond believes he was so attracted to the Marx Brothers was the idea of sibling camaraderie that goes along with their work.
Diamond grew up in Connecticut, but he now resides in New York City. He has a long history with the city, as he would visit a lot with his parents as a child.
Diamond’s love for New York City is right up there with the Marx Brothers and the theater.
“Even on that difficult New York day, when the subway is conspiring to keep you awake or you’re heading at the exposure to the elements that all New Yorkers experience . . . or the absolute congestion of humanity . . . sometimes walking through those scenes, to me, I’m actually walking through Woody Allen’s New York or I’m actually walking through ‘Singing in the Rain.’ The fantasy New York is just as real to me,” said Diamond.
Some of Diamond’s early theater ventures include a theater company with his partner, Amanda Sisk, called Nero Fiddled where they focused on political satire. They wrote, produced and directed four different shows for this company from 2004 to 2008. They found that political commentary isn’t exactly the best subject matter for a production because of how long it takes to develop a musical. The newsreel moves so fast and can become irrelevant after a week or even sometimes a day, so Diamond began looking elsewhere for new creative ideas.
Diamond is different than most other Marx Brothers fans in that theater is his favorite form of medium over film.
“The Marx Brothers on film are incredibly vivid to us . . . and the vaudeville Marx Brothers are so cobwebbed and different . . . that it’s a little hard to really imagine what it was like,” said Diamond.
He decided to make it a personal project to try to revive one of their theatrical performances. “I’ll Say She Is” was the Marx Brothers’ Broadway debut in 1924. The show was never filmed and essentially lost, so Diamond went out of his way to research as much as he could about the production.
He began reading newspapers and finding out more about their vaudeville career that he hadn’t learned from all the books he had read about the Brothers.
“The more I read and the more I learned, I started to realize that little pieces of this lost show were emerging from all this research. There was the 35 page typed script in the Library of Congress, which was like an outline of the show with some dialogue in it, that was a very loose guideline that they used for rehearsal . . . reading all these articles, they would quote dialogue that wasn’t in the typed script and they would describe onstage business that wasn’t in the typed script,” said Diamond.
Six years after Diamond’s first research attempts, he had created a script for “I’ll Say She Is.” It was not exactly a replica of what went down on stage in 1924, but it was a very close recreation.
The original songs were very difficult to find. Diamond managed to track down six of the songs, but half of the score was never published. He was able to find other songs written by the same songwriters, the Johnstone brothers, to add into the score. Some re-writing of the lyrics was done to make the songs fit the context of “I’ll Say She Is.”
“I happened to have the right tools in my toolbox to put this thing together,” said Diamond.
Finding people to cast became the next obstacle, but eventually Diamond had put it all together.
After running into false starts with the producers an opportunity finally presented itself.
Marxfest was organized as a festival in 2014 in New York City. This became the perfect place to reveal “I’ll Say She Is” as a stage reading.
The next step was five smaller-scale sold out performances at the 2014 New York International Fringe Festival. The show was last seen at the Connelly Theater in 2016 where it received a stellar New York Times Review.
Diamond has played Groucho Marx in every production of “I’ll Say She Is” since it was initially lost after 1925.
Today Diamond is a graphic designer, as well as a performer and writer. He has several books available for purchase on his website such as “400 Years in Manhattan” and “Gimme a Thrill: The Story of ‘I’ll Say She Is,’ the Lost Marx Brothers Musical, and How it Was Found.”