So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience books Pikes Peak Center for April

Robert Neary's Neil Diamond show comes to downtown Colorado Springs' symphony hall on Wednesday, April 14, 2027; tickets are on AXS now.

There is a particular sound a full theater makes when the first bars of a song everybody's parents played on the car stereo come up — half cheer, half sigh. Colorado Springs gets a night built around that sound next spring.

So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience plays Pikes Peak Center on Wednesday, April 14, 2027, at 7:30 p.m. The date was announced Oct 26, and tickets are on sale through AXS. A midweek date in a seated hall makes this an easy one to plan around: dinner downtown, show, home at a reasonable hour.

The show belongs to Robert Neary, billed by presenters as a Broadway, television and film performer. According to the Warner Theatre and other venues that have hosted it, Neary created the show in 2019 and refined it during the pandemic alongside The Mystic, the New York band that backs him. The format is simple and generous. Neary performs a long run of Neil Diamond's best-known songs — around 20 of them in Western Michigan University's listing, 22 in others — and, per the Palace Theatre, tells the stories behind some of the classics along the way.

It is a show that has earned its road miles. Presenters including the Lyric Theatre describe it as selling out venues across the country, and it has played everywhere from college performing-arts centers in New Jersey and New York to City National Grove of Anaheim in California. There is also a concert film on Prime Video, shot in front of 10,000 fans at the Harry Chapin Lakeside Theatre in East Meadow, New York — a decent preview if you want to know what you're buying before April.

The room is part of the draw here. Pikes Peak Center opened on Oct. 15, 1982, with the Colorado Springs Symphony Orchestra — now the Colorado Springs Philharmonic — on its stage, according to Wikipedia. It was built by the citizens of El Paso County as a regional cultural and entertainment center and as part of the downtown revitalization effort of the early '80s, as Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum notes. The venue's own materials call it the region's first true symphony hall and point to the acclaim its design and acoustics have drawn since opening night (Pikes Peak Center).

Big, warm, singalong songs in a room designed for an orchestra.

That is a good match for this material: big, warm, singalong songs in a room designed for an orchestra. A tribute show lives or dies on whether the audience feels like it is at a concert rather than a karaoke night, and a hall like this one does a lot of that work before the band plays a note.

Buy the tickets now, put it on the calendar, and start deciding which song you will be loudest on. Everyone has one.

Sources: So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience starring Robert Neary — Warner Theatre (warnertheatre.org); So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience starring Robert Neary — Western Michigan University (wmich.edu); So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience starring Robert Neary — Palace Theatre (palacetheatre.org); So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience — Lyric Theatre (lyrictheatre.com); So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience — City National Grove of Anaheim (citynationalgroveofanaheim.com); So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience — Prime Video (primevideo.com); Pikes Peak Center for the Performing Arts — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Pikes Peak Center — CSPM (cspm.org); Pikes Peak Center venue info (pikespeakcenter.com); So Good! The Neil Diamond Experience — AXS (axs.com)