“Solitary Man: A Tribute to the Songs of Neil Diamond" at the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse -- September 9.
Wednesday, September 9, 1 & 7:15 p.m.
Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse, 1828 Third Avenue, Rock Island IL
A beloved venue regular at Rock Island's Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse will take on the repertoire of one of history's most admired singer/songwriters in the September 9 concert event Solitary Man: A Tribute to the Songs of Neil Diamond, with Hauskins and a team of gifted musicians treating audiences to adored smash hits including “America,” “Forever in Blue Jeans,” and “Sweet Caroline.”
To date, the 85-year-old Diamond has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had 10 chart-topping singles on Billboard's Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie," "Song Sung Blue," "Longfellow Serenade," "I've Been This Way Before," "If You Know What I Mean," "Desirée," "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" (Diamond's duet with Barbra Streisand), "America," "Yesterday's Songs," and "Heartlight," the latter inspired by Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. In total, 38 songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts, and his movie debut in 1980's The Jazz Singer earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. More recently, Diamond's legacy was celebrated in the Oscar-nominated musical dramedy Song Sung Blue.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," and Billboard ranked him as the 25th greatest artist of all time. Diamond is also the only musician to score a top 20 hit in each decade since the origin of Billboard’s Adult Contemporary Chart, and over a career spanning five decades, he has scored 16 top-10 albums on Billboard charts.
Performing from Diamond's expansive repertoire in Circa '21's concert is Brad Hauskins, the theatre's current bar manager who began his Circa '21 career as a member of the theatre's performing wait staff of Bootleggers in 1987, and who previously performed sold-out Solitary Man productions in 2021 and 2024. Over the years, he has appeared in such venue productions as Fiddler on the Roof, Shear Madness, Grumpy Old Men: The Musical, and The Music Man, and Hauskins can currently be seen in Circa '21's stage version of The Wizard of Oz. Earlier this year, Hauskins also appeared as a comical corpse in Circa '21's Lucky Stiff, as well as Jaws co-star Robert Shaw in the Black Box Theatre's June presentation of The Shark Is Broken.
Solitary Man: A Tribute to the Songs of Neil Diamond will enjoy two performances on September 9, at 1 p.m. (11:45 a.m. doors, noon plated lunch) and 7:15 p.m. (5:45 p.m. doors, 6 p.m. plated dinner). Admission is $67-72, and more information and tickets are available by calling (309)786-7733 extension 2 and visiting Circa21.com.
