Review: The Notebook Is Broadway’s Guaranteed Tearjerker

“OK. I get it. You think this movie is stupid,” my husband said as we watched the film adaptation of The Notebook. “You don’t have to fake cry like an asshole.” But I wasn’t. Icy critic that I am, I was astonished to find myself melting into tears the first time I saw the scene in which a woman suffering from dementia (played by Gena Rowlands) fails to recognize her own husband (James Garner). I see a lot of weepy theater from which I typically emerge with dry eyes, but this scene in this film never fails to get me. What is this dark magic?

I doubt it derives from the source material. Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel is nearly unreadable — although I’m reliably told it has sold over 100 million copies.  The 2004 film, directed by Nick Cassavetes, was a box office hit and remains a classic of the romance genre, I suspect for its surefire ability to activate the waterworks. That would seem to auger well for The Notebook, the musical version that just opened at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre following a world premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Musical theater is all about big emotions expressed through even bigger voices, and The Notebook has plenty of both. Bekah Brunstetter, a writer and producer of the tear-soaked TV drama This Is Us, hews much closer to the novel with her dramatically sound and smartly enhanced book. Her major revision is to update the central couple from the GI generation to the Baby Boom generation, allowing the frame of the story to exist here and now — and perhaps directly brush up against the experiences of people in the audience.

It takes place in a nursing home where Allie (Maryann Plunkett) lives with what little remains of her memory. Like Scheherazade on Medicare, her husband Noah (Dorian Harewood) daily attempts to bring her back by reading from a notebook in which Allie recorded the story of their romance: their wild teenage courtship (convincing puppy love from John Cardoza and Jordan Tyson), their estrangement during Allie’s college years and Noah’s Vietnam service, and their steamy reunion on the eve of Allie’s marriage to Lon (Chase Del Rey). Obviously, she ends up with Noah, but learning how is central to this sentimental journey — one that Allie takes every single day.

Your milage may vary. My husband was a wreck after just the first act, but I wasn’t as moved by the musical as I was the film, a form that is simultaneously more intimate and frighteningly real.

My detachment may have been prompted by Ingrid Michaelson’s score, a parade of confessional power ballads that are pretty in the moment, but evaporated from my memory by the time I stepped out onto 45^th Street. They’re the kind of generic musical-theater songs beloved by drama students for the way they show off both an actor’s emotional and vocal range, with the biggest numbers ending in a glory note that the audience instinctively drowns with applause.

No one in the cast interprets this material better than Joy Woods, who plays the adult version of Allie opposite Ryan Vasquez’s grown-up Noah. I don’t remember much about the song “Forever,” but I will never forget the image of Woods caressing Noah’s kitchen table “which I bet he built himself” (Michaelson’s lyrics are considerably better than her music, as this clever shout-out to the Hallmark movie genre proves).  Woods breathes life and personality into each verse, so we become invested in Allie’s love story.

As the elderly versions of Allie and Noah, Plunkett and Harewood also tug at our heart strings. Allie’s distress is apparent from the moment we first spot her furrowed brow. She seems to be attempting to work out an impossible algebra equation with ever more variables. She wraps herself in the armor of a long blue cardigan, prepared to do battle with an increasingly alien world. Harewood is the only actor who successfully did leave me a little misty with his portrayal of a man near the end of life, determined to spend what little time he has left with the woman he loves. As in the film, it’s the older couple that leaves you destroyed.

Wisely, directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams make it difficult to separate the three generations, tying the Allies and Noahs together through color-coordinated costumes (by Paloma Young) and Katie Spelman’s dreamy choreography, which presents a wonderfully fluid vision of time. The set (by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis) facilitates these leaps across the timeline while constantly reminding us of the house Noah restored to make a home for Allie. Memories happy and sad emerge from the shadows of Ben Stanton’s lighting, with the echoes of years past reverberating through Nevin Steinberg’s finely balanced sound design.

All of it presents a beautiful picture of mortality, but also the universality of love. The six actors playing Noah and Allie are of varying ages and ethnicities (in a time of color-conscious casting, The Notebook bravely dares to be color-blind). This strikes at the heart of what I suspect undergirds the enduring popularity of The Notebook. This could be anyone’s story, and the poetic end that comes for Noah and Allie represents the very happiest resolution. That’s enough to make anyone cry.