Another step in the sentimental journey

Juliet Cervantes

Say The notebook had a devoted, built-in audience before singing even a note on Broadway would be an understatement that this romantic tearjerker never attempts.

Based on Nicholas Sparks’ 1996 bestseller about a young (then older, then much older) couple who survive a life of tribulations (until they don’t), tonight’s musical premiere at the Schoenfeld Theater is the theatrical equivalent of muzak, comforting in its blatantly manipulative way and unabashed in its disdain for anything approaching the grit of the real world. (The 2004 film adaptation, while known today for much more than nostalgia, is remembered for its initial casting of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.)

The reference to muzak, by the way, is not intended to suggest that composer Ingrid Michaelson looks back that far for her musical inspirations. She has a lovely way with melody, even if many of the songs on Laptop They’re repetitive, midtempo ballads sung directly to the audience, as if anything less obvious might risk one or two people on the balcony missing the point: Ally and Noah love each other. We really, really love each other.

Of all the show’s disappointments planted like so many wildflowers ready to be plucked, none sting as much as Michaelson’s score. Not that it’s bad – it’s not, far from it – but in more than two hours of music you’d be hard-pressed to find two minutes and 17 seconds as melodically charming or as lyrically clever as the singer-songwriter’s charming 2007. Indie pop hit “The Way I Am,” with its sweet promise of young love “I’ll buy you Rogaine/when you start losing all your/sewing patches/on everything you break.” However, one of the first duets between Younger Ally and Younger Noah, “Carry You Home,” comes close thanks to his joyful spirit.

The conceit of the book, movie, and now musical is that the couple Ally and Noah are depicted at three crucial moments in their long forty-something years or so together. We meet the couple in their youth, and later in a nursing home where Noah reads pages from a notebook detailing the story of his life, hoping against hope that the story will rekindle memories that Ally’s Alzheimer’s almost has erased. (The older versions are performed by Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood, and are almost worth the price of admission alone.)

At least in this latest adaptation, which had a hit in 2022 in Chicago, writer Bekah Brunstetter (who trafficked in the same audience-pleasing sentimentality as writer and producer of the NBC show We are) wastes no time hiding the fact that the old man and the old woman are later versions of the younger versions who share the stage. Anyone still confused by the concept would do well to pay attention to Katie Spelman’s choreography, with her simultaneous gestures for each generation. When, at first, the old man touches his neck, so do the middleman and the young man. It’s not exactly subtle, but it works.

The couple first meet as teenagers in a mid-Atlantic coastal town where wealthy Ally (Jordan Tyson) falls madly in love (and vice versa) with working-class citizen Noah (John Cardoza). Despite the smug taunts of Ally’s parents (Andrea Burns, Charles Wallace), the children spend a few carefree, starry-eyed weeks before the elders cut short the family vacation and whisk their smitten daughter away. came.

The action begins about 10 years after the summer separation (although the time periods flow into each other in the performance, and the three generations frequently share the stage). Noah spent his early years in the war: Brunstetter time-jumped the conflict from World War II in the book and the film to Vietnam for the setting, perhaps to avoid too stale period details. Neither Paloma Young’s costume design nor Michael Greif and Schele Williams’ co-direction make undue fuss (or any, really) about the decade’s meanings: there are no groovy ’60s outfits or ’70s lapels in sight . Timelessness seems to be the point, but it’s also a kind of joyless drag.

When we get to Act II, the Middles get the focus, and while Ryan Vasquez and Joy Woods have fine, strong voices, they can do little to increase the tension of the drama: Brunstetter’s reluctance to play the waiting game, so welcome early. Go ahead, it backfires when we’re suddenly expected to entertain the idea that Ally’s barely-seen fiancé could keep any of us away from our date with the nursing home. The Middles’ “will they or won’t they” is made even more tedious by a foolish, years-long effort by their mama dearest to keep the lovers apart, a devious ploy involving letters from hidden lovers that would put any old soap opera to shame. and covered. matriarch of opera.

Set primarily in a nursing home set by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis that manages to be engaging and suitably unpleasant (Noah’s renovated antibellum farm hits nostalgic notes without summoning unwanted ghosts), The notebook reaches its final pages – or almost – without allowing its manipulations to become too dominant (more on that “almost” in a moment), but it never addresses the best works of almost everyone involved (director Greif gave us Along with Normal and Dear Evan Hansen). The wonderful Plunkett captures the confusion and panic of dementia early on, which means she has little place to go. Woods, as Middle Ally, breaks the musical similarity with the production’s unmistakable spectacle (“My Days”), although her musical theater sass seems to have no counterpart in either the younger or older versions of the character.

Still, whatever its shortcomings, The notebook it shudders completely only in its final moments, when, in rapid succession, a near-miracle is followed by a shared farewell so timely that an atomic clock would make one envious. Major Noah has been telling us over and over again that Major Ally will keep his promise to “return” to him if he keeps reading that diary, a hope that will sound familiar to any family unlucky enough to suffer from dementia. Families who have learned the hard way that Alzheimer’s doesn’t play miracles have every right to be offended by this nonsense.

Qualification: The notebook
Event: Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway
Director: Michael Greif and Schele Williams
Book: Bekah Brunstetter
Music and lyrics: Ingrid Michaelson
Cast: Jordan Tyson, Joy Woods, Maryann Plunkett, John Cardoza, Ryan Vasquez, Dorian Harewood, with Andréa Burns, Yassmin Alers, Alex Benoit, Chase Del Rey, Hillary Fisher, Jerome Harmann-Hardeman, Dorcas Leung, Happy McPartlin, Juliette Ojeda, Kim Onah, Carson Stewart, Charles E. Wallace and Charlie Webb.
Execution time: 2 hours 10 minutes (including intermission)