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The organizational presumption of production and the sole creative risk are partly to blame. As in the 2003 film, an older Allie (Maryann Plunkett) has forgotten her decades-long romance with dreamer Noah (Dorian Harewood), who recounts her saga in a notebook. Here, the younger and middle-aged versions of Allie (Jordan Tyson and Joy Woods) and Noah (John Cardoza and Ryan Vasquez) represent their shared past.
The well-known overarching theme – love overcoming the passage of time – is clearly explained from the beginning: “Time, time, time, time; It was never mine, mine, mine, mine,” sings a gentle and genial Harewood in the characteristically direct opening lyrics. (Plunkett stands out as a skeptical audience surrogate until she falls into a hazy stupor.) All six iterations of the lovers are on stage, although it may take the audience a moment to notice.
Directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams have assembled a talented cast of performers to play Allie and Noah. The fact that they are from diverse racial backgrounds gives the audience a good opportunity to expand their imagination. But the scrupulously colorblind cast also prevents the show from making many other narrative decisions, to the detriment of its own logic and appeal.
Race could have been a dynamic tool to enrich an otherwise basic plot. Teenagers Allie and Noah meet in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, when even on the Mid-Atlantic coast, their interracial sparks might have partly helped explain why Allie’s mother (Andréa Burns) disapproves of him. (The change of setting from 1940s North Carolina at least saves us from a scene of loss of white innocence on the floor of a ruined plantation house.)
By contrast, Brunstetter’s book, which sprawls slowly as it moves back and forth over half a century, resists delineating the central pair with many identifying details. Allie still likes to paint and Noah is good with wood, but an effort to maximize their relationship ends up sacrificing his flesh and blood. The roles can be played by different actors because there is nothing very particular about any of the characters. The result is bland and lacks the erotic charge of an attraction with a distinctive flavor in the face of a recognizable world.
Michaelson’s pop music sticks to expressions of emotion – “Sadness and Joy,” “I Wanna Go Back,” “We Have to Try” – that could fit into almost any boy-meets-girl tale, complete with acoustic guitar, violins. swollen and tinkling. harp, all replacing the heartstrings. The songs draw little inspiration from the various musical eras that history traverses, instead maintaining a pleasant and inviting contemporary sheen.
The same goes for the physical production, which shimmers in the reflection of the water’s edge upstage, beneath a canopy of A-frames and upright fluorescent bulbs that shine like stationary shooting stars (the set is David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis, Ben Stanton’s lighting). Greif and Williams’ staging cuts across places and generations with beautiful efficiency, helped in part by Paloma Young’s costumes, whose period endings are extremely subtle.
The affair at its core, however stubbornly conventional, will be enough to fuel the enthusiasm of some “The Notebook” fans, whose nostalgia for the property will fill in the blanks on the stage. But the musical’s treatment of mortality, while another easy lever to pull, seems to have a more organic resonance. No matter what kind of love exists between them, death will certainly separate them all. That’s a truth that many people would pay to cry about in the dark.
The notebook, in progress at the Schoenfeld Theater in New York. 2 hours, 20 minutes. musicalnotebook.com.