THE NOTEBOOK
Book by Bekah Brunstetter
Music and Lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson
Based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
Directed by Michael Greif and Schelle Williams
Schoenfeld Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (perhaps most famous for The Horse Whisperer), The Notebook dramatizes a lifelong romance by intertwining three timelines. The first in an old age home in which Older Noah (Dorian Harewood) reads to Older Allie (Maryann Plunkett) from a notebook. Older Allie has dementia and doesn’t know anymore who Older Noah is. But he reads in the hope of bringing at least part of her, the part that would remember that he’s her husband, back. For the notebook contains his narrative of their romance, which unfolds as he reads—
Starting in a seaside town in South Carolina, where the union of Young Noah (John Cardoza) and Young Allie (Jordan Tyson) is star-crossed because of her parents; then skipping to years later, when Middle Noah (Ryan Vasquez) has returned from the army and Middle Ally (Joy Woods) is on the verge of marrying someone else.
Though love stories need to be a crucial component of most book musicals, they tend to be soft as the central focus. That’s because most of their action is internal; things will work out or they won’t. Romance at the core isn’t a native drawback to film because of film’s up-close intimacy. But a musical, which elevates energy and emphasis, tends to need the drive of a plot—to which love stories do their best work as an interconnected sidebar; they’re part of what’s at stake in the main character’s pursuit of a much more tangible objective; or per West Side Story, as the symbolic underdog surrounded by a polarized community.
What makes The Notebook the proverbial exception that sortakinda proves the rule?
Its moving parts give it three genuine plots: young love battling authority; middle love battling the baggage, misunderstandings and assumptions that built up during separation during the years between; and old love battling the ravages of time for recognition before it’s too late. That, for a love story, is unusually busy; and it gives librettist Bekah Brunstetter and composer-lyricist Ingrid Michaelson enough material to keep suspense in the air…save for moments when they succumb to just singin’ about love, or about a crisis of indecision whose resolution is so perfectly obvious that the angst is just marking time to give the singer a few money notes. Yawn. But the show recovers.
Under the co-direction of Michael Greif and Schelle Williams, The Notebook has one more trick up its proverbial sleeve. It very deliberately, yet tacitly, obliterates ethnicity-specific casting. From young to old: the Noahs are a White American, a Hispanic American and an African American; the Allys are a Hispanic American, an African American and a White American. It’s not the first non-literal diversity casting I (or indeed you) have ever seen by a long shot…but for the creative team to present this story in that way is a pretty bold move, even for 2024. Making a statement about racial equality by making no statement, just treating co-existence matter-of-factly, has not been uncommon in the last half-century—especially in movies and television (the mid-late ‘60s TV series I Spy was probably the first). Among recent generations it’s even become the order of the day.
But The Notebook presents a circumstance of racial irrelevancy—in this very specific context: It posits that, even shifting among timelines, any performer of any lineage may be the custodian of a character’s soul in a story about soul mates.
All this said, The Notebook won’t be for everybody. It’s unabashedly sentimental and proudly manipulative. And comes with a built-in fan base who love the book and the subsequent film adaptation, which was also hugely popular. And those fans in attendance, and they seem to be legion, are not shy about expressing their affection, right from the start.
But the show fills a niche musicals don’t get to fill successfully that often. And performs a significant social service in the process. I begrudge it none of the good fortune that may come it way.