The Notebook Broadway Reviews

When songs provide so little information, barely differentiating the characters let alone advancing the plot, a musical tends to sag. And when a musical has gone to some trouble to accommodate those songs — the movie of “The Notebook” runs two hours, the show hardly 20 minutes more — the trade-offs are of the nose-versus-face variety.

The bombastic musical that opened Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre is about a love for the ages but has understated songs by Ingrid Michaelson, who offers coffee house vibes instead of passion’s thunder. The book by Bekah Brunstetter loses gas well before it’s over and piles on the melodrama.

There are two main reasons why this show works. Most important is the songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, who might be a Broadway newcomer, but whose lyrics eschew the mawkish pitfalls in favor of simple, direct communication of intense but familiar emotions through melody and song.

Everyone's heard of The Notebook. Whether it’s through reading Nicholas Sparks’ best-selling debut novel or its 2004 blockbuster adaptation starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, most can recall some semblance of Noah and Allie’s whirlwind romance — or, at the very least, their propensity for arguing and dramatic kisses in the rain. Now, The Notebook is leaping off the page and onto the stage in a poignant new musical that is, without a doubt, its finest adaptation yet.

Dementia is a horrifically flattening illness. But it is difficult to sustain the show’s over two hour runtime on the question of reconciliation. The musical’s use of interracial casting is also frustrating. Younger and middle Allie are both Black, while older Allie is white. The Noahs are cast in a similar fashion. The issues with casting isn’t a problem of believability, but consistency. It’s strange why the racial unity in casting is interrupted, especially with no discernible dramatic choice. Sympathizers will waive off the choice as negligible, a side effect of race-blind casting. But race isn’t a minor detail, especially with swaths of the play taking place right before and after the Vietnam war – well into the civil rights era. The Notebook musical hasn’t lost its romantic magic, by any means. But without the equally touching music and a fleshing out of its core courtship, it’s a story that remains underwritten.

While the cast of “The Notebook” sings and dances up onstage at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, there is an even more dramatic performance going on in the seats. The sniffle chorus. Ingrid Michaelson’s musical, which opened Thursday night on Broadway is, of course, based on Nicholas Sparks’ weepy 1996 romance novel that was made into a popular movie starring a young Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. Like Pavlov’s pups, millennials habitually sob during that 2004 film, and the production has seized upon its teary reputation by selling branded tissue boxes. During the final 10 minutes, the noses are deafening.

Instead, Brunstetter’s book, which spreads thin as it flits back and forth through a half-century, resists delineating the central pair with much of any identifying detail. Allie still likes to paint and Noah is good with lumber, but an effort to maximize their relatability winds up sacrificing their flesh and blood. The roles can be played by different actors because there’s nothing very particular about either character. The result is anodyne — and lacks the erotic charge of an attraction with distinct flavor set against a recognizable world.

Nevertheless, the comparative simplicity of the teary tale at its center—love at first sight strikes boy and girl like lightning, they are separated for a decade, and then the couple reunites for a striding-into-the-sunset happy ending (before age and illness impinge)—left me dry-eyed and occasionally tempted to check my watch. This may put me in the minority, given the story’s proven success in other mediums, but for all its sweetness and polish “The Notebook” never rises to truly transporting heights—except when Ms. Plunkett, as the heroine, Allie, in her later years, and Dorian Harewood, as her husband, Noah, are the focus.

Played out mostly on a nursing home set by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis that manages to be both attractive and suitably off-putting (Noah’s renovated antibellum farmhouse hits nostalgic notes without summoning unwelcome ghosts), The Notebook gets to its final pages – or very nearly so - without letting its manipulations become too overbearing (more about that “nearly so” in a moment), yet it never approaches the finer works of nearly everyone involved (director Greif gave us Next To Normal and Dear Evan Hansen). The wonderful Plunkett nails the confusion and panic of dementia from the get-go, meaning she has little place to go. Woods, as Middle Ally, breaks through the musical sameness with the production’s unequivocal showstopper (“My Days”), though her musical theater brassiness seems to have no counterpart in either the character’s younger and older versions.

And boy, are there lows. It’s a great credit to the production that as the horrors of dementia come into focus the show doesn’t fully drown in the tears (SO many tears!) of audience members. Instead, we’re left with a soft landing of sorts, thanks to the restrained, emotional performances of Harewood and Plunkett, melding the hopelessness of a disease with the hope that must come through in some way in all musicals — even the tragedies. If fans are left wishing they’d gotten a bit more time with people they’ve grown to care about, well, don’t we all.

Brunstetter’s script advises that the sets (by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis) and costumes (by Paloma Young) “feel timeless.” That approach sometimes works for a classic tragedy, but a melodrama like “The Notebook” needs context. In this musical, the only thing keeping Allie and Noah apart is her rather uppity parents (Andrea Burns and Charles E. Wallace). Ingrid Michaelson’s score is middle-of-the-road pop. It’s pleasant. It’s easy on the ears. It’s not in any way what this musical needs to be, which is soaring and romantic.

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.

And yet: As much as I rolled my eyes at The Notebook, I can’t deny that they sometimes welled up. In this version, it’s the older Noah and Allie—whom Brunstetter draws with the most care, free from the fetters of plot, and around whom Michaelson writes her most touching music—who get to you. Plunkett’s truthfulness pierces through the sentimentality, and there’s something elemental in the combination of love and loss that this pair embodies. As Younger Noah says of Allie’s painting: “It’s sadness and it’s joy, right?” At its best, The Notebook finds a way to deliver both, if only in shorthand.

Because writing for character means writing in distinct voices, there’s a thin line in musical theater songwriting between the simple and the simplistic: Unlike her gratifyingly accessible pop music, Michaelson’s score here falls on the wrong side too much of the time. That’s a shame, because, in revisiting the story, Michaelson and book writer Bekah Brunstetter have laid out the structure for a thoughtful adaptation that improves upon both the book and the film adaptation.

“The Notebook: The Musical” will probably not be the same kind of star-making vehicle, but it is uniformly well-cast, with several memorable performances. The story is cleverly adapted by librettist Bekah Brunstetter, who seems almost as much guided by the TV series “This Is Us” (where she worked as a writer and producer) as by Sparks’ novel. And singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, in her Broadway songwriting debut, delivers almost two dozen largely folk and country-inflected melodies, most of them lovely, if blandly so; only a few stand out. Little in this musical may soar, but, given the potential of the material for over-the-top melodrama, the relatively low-key approach is part of the show’s appeal.

It was only a matter of time before a stage adaptation of The Notebook came to fruition. Based on Nicholas Sparks’ best selling novel, the popular 2004 film starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling is a romantic (if rather schmaltzy) stunner. There is naturally a built-in audience for this musical, clamoring to know if it’s as good as the movie and how does it compare? And for those new to the tear-jerker story of Allie and Noah from opposite sides of the tracks, does it still resonate at all? The answer to that last question is most certainly yes, it does resonate. I think you’d have to hail from another planet not to feel something for these appealing characters. By the resounding sniffles heard throughout the audience, it most certainly succeeded on that front. And yet, despite some lovely songs and excellent performances, the musical is missing some keynotes.

This is one of those musicals that some viewers will love vociferously while others, inevitably, espouse a decidedly contradictory view. There is enough quality entertainment on hand, especially from the performers, to provide viewers with a thoroughly watchable two-and-a-half hours. In normal Broadway seasons, when full-scale original musicals can be counted on a hand’s worth of fingers, these attributes might be enough to place The Notebook in the Tony winner’s circle, or at least in contention. But based on the 2023-24 musicals which have opened thus far and those which have already been seen in pre-Broadway mountings, one might predict that The Notebook will fall far above the worst but not in league with the best.

If I had to take bets on how many actual tears The Notebook The Musical manages to jerk — well, I wouldn’t advise anyone to bring a bucket. With prosaic direction and a strangely heavy and sterile aesthetic sense that feels, despite Schele Williams’s presence as a co-director, all too similar to Michael Greif’s other productions this season, as well as a surprisingly beige slate of songs by the folk-pop artist Ingrid Michaelson, the show disappears from memory almost moment to moment. It’s almost enough to make one want to reference the half of the story’s plot that deals with dementia.

This compelling conceit gets weakened by a flat book and lyrics. Brunstetter and Michaelson aim for simplicity, but lyrics like a repeated “sadness and joy” fail to illuminate Noah and Allie's depth of character. The Notebook: The Musical can only compensate so much with Michaelson's strumming music, with repetitions that are pleasant but melt together, and some songs become indistinguishable from each other. Occasionally, a flourish in John Clancy and Carmel Dean's orchestrations grabs the attention.

As for the production, the staging by Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “Next to Normal”) and Schele Williams (“The Wiz”) feels, for all its intention of intimacy, contrived and unsurprising. For a while the cross-cutting of the three couples haunting each other is intriguing but soon Katie Spelman’s choreography of past and future lives ever-circling each other simply becomes a dizzying one-note effect. The cross-racial casting of couples nicely underscores the universality of the romance and the ease of imaginative leaps in musical theater.