‘Notebook’ musical is sad/joyful, cheesy/poignant
THREE AGES OF ALLIE & NOAH: (from left) Kyle Mangold and Chloë Cheers, Ken Wulf Clark and Alysha Deslorieux and Beau Gravitte and Sharon Catherine Brown in The Notebook the Musical, part of the ATG San Francisco season at the Orpehum Theatre. Photo by Roger Mastroianni
It’s laid out pretty simply in song: “It's loving when it's hard to love and laughing when it's sad/It's fighting then making up and fighting all again/And making love and babies/Raising hell and then heaven/It's sadness and it's joy/Sadness and it's joy.”
People love The Notebook because of its sadness and its joy, its sadness and its joy. They love the original 1996 Nicholas Sparks book. They love the 2004 movie starring Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Gena Rowlands and James Garner. And now they can love the by-the-numbers musical that opened and closed on Broadway in 2024 and is currently inspiring a river of tears across the country.
RAIN DANCE: Alysha Deslorieux is Middle Allie and Ken Wulf Clark is Middle Noah. Photo by Roger Mastroianni
The touring show, now at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the ATG San Francisco (the newly renamed BroadwaySF) season hits all the highlights, underscores, doodles and marginalia you might expect to find in the well-worn Notebook.
While the movie offered us two pairs of main characters Allie and Noah – in their teens and 20s and then in their 70s – the musical has three couples (teens, 20s, 70s), presumably for better three-part harmonies.While having six actors play two characters is a lot, this theatrical flourish is actually the best thing about the stage adaptation.
Although the folk-pop score by Ingrid Michaelson is pleasant, nothing really sticks – except when we have all the Allie/Noah voices joining together. This combination is exciting and gives the storytelling something fresh to work with in depicting the notion of how we are and how we remember ourselves at various stages in our lives. Music, we’re told toward the show’s start, lives in a special part of our brains, and it’s the last to go.
And this is especially poignant given that Older Allie (beautifully played by Sarah Catherine Brown) is in the throes of dementia and is constantly being reminded of her life/love story by Older Noah (Beau Gravitte) in the hope that she’ll remember him, if only momentarily. So having her younger selves constantly surrounding her as she weaves in and out of significant life events lends depth to a part of the story that feels less like romantic cliché and more like the terrifying and resoundingly sad thing it actually is.
TIME, TIME, TIME: Sharon Catherine Brown is Older Allie and Beau Gravitte is Older Noah. Photo by Roger Mastroianni
Otherwise, Bekah Brunstetter’s prosaic book and the direction by Michael Greif and Schele Williams mostly splash around in the shallow waters of underdeveloped love stories where nobody is very interesting yet we’re expected to care about their romantic yearnings.
The set, by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis, is serviceable when it comes to depicting a care facility or a kitchen/dining room and much dreamier when we’re at Noah and Allie’s decrepit fixer-upper dream house (where no one ever uses the big blue front door for some reason) or on the shores of a river. Oddly, through the whole show, columns of light hover, giving the stage the feel of a high-end wedding venue. And there’s so much stage smoke throughout that we get a very clear definition of “the fog of memory.”
Of course there’s the story’s trademark kiss-in-the-rain scene (it’s always fun to see rain on stage), and though Michaelson’s score offers Middle Allie (Alysha Deslorieux) a stop-the-show ballad with “My Days,” it turns out to be more about volume than drama, which is disappointing. Think middling Allie.
By story’s end, when the tears should be flowing, I was unmoved, though the person next to me was wiping her eyes with little tissues from a branded The Notebook tissue box while scrolling on her phone. The vocal arrangement (by Michaelson and Carmel Dean) swells into a thing of beauty as the full cast sings about being out at sea, remembering people when they’re gone and carrying them home, and it’s all lovely and sad and stirring. But then all that fades just as quickly as it came, a misty blur of a show that feels like it was barely there at all.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The Notebook the Musical continues through March 1 as part of the ATG San Francisco season at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes (including one intermission). Tickets are $62.01-$263.25 (subject to change). Call 888-746-1799 or visit atgtickets.com.
