The Notebook
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York City ★★★★
“Love is powerful. Dementia is sad. The result can be heartbreaking,” said Jesse Green in The New York Times. Those truths, plus the added fact that most ticket buyers for Broadway’s The Notebook will have read Nicholas Sparks’ best-selling novel or seen the beloved 2004 movie, explain why the new musical’s producers sell $5 packages of tissues in the lobby. Unfortunately, this stage version “makes few convincing arguments for a separate existence.” The glossiness of the Ryan Gosling– Rachel McAdams screen adaptation was arguably “the only thing holding the picture together.” True, it’s compelling to see the central couple, Noah and Allie, played here at three different ages by actors of differing racial backgrounds, and to also see three versions of both characters share the stage. But the show’s songs are “as insubstantial as blue smoke,” and opening room for them has only made the plot more meretricious.
Maryann Plunkett, as the elder Allie, elevates the show significantly, said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. Playing a nursing-home patient suffering the effects of what appears to be Alzheimer’s disease, the veteran Broadway actress “gives a performance of breathtaking delicacy and truth.” And she’s nicely matched by Dorian Harewood as the older Noah, who reads from a notebook created years earlier as he gently attempts to reawaken Allie’s memories of their first encounter and the obstacles they overcame to be together.
Unfortunately, this love story remains “as slight as jottings in a journal,” said Frank Rizzo in Variety. The songs added by indiefolk singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson are “pleasant enough,” but the decision to move the couple’s teenage first shared sparks from the 1940s to the ’60s only results in a vague sense of time and place. For a musical like this to work, we also have to be sold on the couple’s special connection, and it’s just not here: “no charm, no complexity, nothing special.” It may be, though, that the blandness will help The Notebook when it eventually moves on from Broadway. Most likely, “it will land better on tour where the enchantment bar is lower.”