Interview: John Cardoza on Love, Loss, and The Notebook

The past few years of John Cardoza’s life have been filled with a wide assortment of theater. In 2019, he made his Broadway debut in the ensemble of Jagged Little Pill. After the Covid shutdown, he played Young Noah in the world premiere of Ingrid Michaelson and Bekah Brunstetter’s The Notebook, after which, in rapid succession, he starred in the musical version of The Karate Kid and as Christian in the Moulin Rouge! tour. Now, Cardoza’s world has settled a bit: he’s back on Broadway in The Notebook, playing Young Noah once again.

The role is very important to him. Like his character, Cardoza is dealing with the grief that comes from losing a parent. He’s had to navigate that grief in real life, while doing it onstage, capturing the disparate forces of real and staged emotion at the same time. Ultimately, he’s finding it an immeasurably affirming experience.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’re opened and in a groove with the show by now. How’s it going?
It’s going very well. We’re very proud of it. When I was first introduced to the material, it was really moving and stuck with me, so it was a little nerve-racking, both in Chicago and now, to continuously release it to more and more people. You don’t know if people are going to love it the way that you love it. But the audience reaction does not lie.

This was my first time experiencing anything Notebook-related. I’d never read the book or seen the movie.
I think that’s the perfect way to go in, and I think that even for the folks who do have an attachment to the source material, it’s helpful to release your expectations and allow it to be its own piece. But for those who can’t release the attachment, I think they’ll still be satisfied with the pulse and heartbeat of the show feeling the same. You can tell that the source material flows through it, but I do think that this stands on its own as an artistic piece.

How do you go about creating a fully rounded character when you’re sharing the role with two other people?
It starts with the self, because we were not necessarily called into the same rehearsals. I wasn’t always watching older Noah or middle Noah rehearse; we’re building our own piece. Naturally, you are going to bring your own lived experience to the character, because that is what we do.

In that sense, the three characters are going to have their own individual development. It’s not until we were brought all together into that same room that we started to find the through lines. We began with finding a similar language of movement to tie the three of them together and ground them in something that feels like it flows through all three characters.

But in the same way that I am not the same person that I was 10 years ago, it makes sense for Noah to feel different as he grows up. They did a beautiful job of keeping just enough of the character in the material throughout that you do feel a marriage of actors.

How has your Noah changed or grown since you first started working with the material?
There’s a lot of intersection of myself and this character. One of those things is that we both share the loss of our mothers, but he is much farther out from that event than I am. I lost my mom a few years ago; he’s almost a decade out.

As I have more and more time to process and understand the way that that event continues to shape me as a person and the way that I move through the world, it enriches the character. I’ve had the opportunity to explore and investigate my own experience of that love and grief through the lens of character work. It will probably be the most important thing that’s ever happened to me because it shapes you. I’ve learned so much about the way I want to carry her with me through the way that I have decided that Noah carries his mother with him.

Something I love so much about him is, maybe initially, myself along with many other people in the world would blanket him with the term sadness. He’s a sad character because he’s had so much tragedy. But for me, it’s less of a sadness and more of a really hard-won strength and peace that he has made with a challenging world. And even amid all the sadness in his life and in his early childhood, he still finds all these pockets of joy throughout his day that encourage him to wake up the next morning.

As an actor, what is it like for you to hear such a vocal reaction from the audience night after night? Obviously, you have to ignore the sniffles so you don’t leave the story.
Yeah. For the sake of the show, you have to move past it. You can’t sacrifice your story for any sort of reaction. I do think there is a magnetic quality between the audience and actors with this show. You watch this lifetime play out in front of you and the material welcomes you to imprint your own memories and experiences onto the story. There’s a cathartic release on both ends that brings cast and audience together, and it’s really affirming.

I hope that when people leave the theater, they are reminded that their lives are just as important as the life that is being played out onstage. The lives that Noah and Allie lead are very normal and accessible. The only reason that it’s an exceptional story is because they’ve decided that every moment they have together is worth saving in a journal. If you save every moment that you have with the people around you and you look back on it 10 years from now, the nostalgia is unavoidable. I hope that everybody recognizes where they belong in the story and that they are inspired to appreciate on a deeper level the moments of their lives that they would have overlooked before.