THE NOTEBOOK Brings Heartfelt Passion To Broadway — Review

A musical adaptation of The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks’ weepy novel about a longtime couple whose love outlasts class barriers and degenerative illness, later immortalized on film, provides as good a cry as you might imagine. It banks on a sweet, golden-haze-of-summer score by Ingrid Michaelson and genial performances from its three duos that play the central couple Noah and Allie through puppy-love adolescence (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza), a separated adulthood (Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez), and an autumn (Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood) complicated by her struggles with Alzheimer’s disease.

Bekah Brunstetter’s book cleverly has actors playing significant people from Allie’s past — Andréa Burns and Charles E. Wallace as her disapproving parents — double as the hazy figures she sees at the nursing home at which she resides, like her nurse and now-adult son. David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis’ scenic design also swiftly riffs on its main set: a gorgeous wood-beamed skeleton of a Southern home, complete with a watery brook at the lip of the stage.

The middle pairing, which makes up most of the second act, feels both rushed yet incomplete at points, though Woods’ nervous doe energy and Vasquez’ resolve nicely set up their elders’ characterizations. Plunkett’s poignant performance evokes tears at every turn, and Harewood’s wise, warming presence creates a veteran atmosphere of sturdy storytelling. 

Michael Greif and Schele Williams’ shared direction match Michaelson’s ability to capably blur the line between past and present, and what’s lost at each generational turn. One song memorably laments each Allie not knowing “the last time I’d leave the house was the last time I’d leave the house;” though the show’s best number, a standalone ballad titled “What Happens,” cautiously yearns for updates on a former lover’s life.

A shrug from a tear-stained shoulder is certainly not the worst way to exit a musical, so even if The Notebook isn’t reinventing any wheels, it turns them with earnest, somehow not-too-sentimental, precision.

The Notebook is in performance at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on West 45th Street in New York City.