Musical theater can be a cliche for the romantic tale, whether it’s about obsessive devotion, idealized passion, or lost love. “The Notebook,” based on Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling 1996 novel, contains elements of all three — but delicately rendered here in this remarkable musical, full of emotion and steeped in wistful longing and wish fulfillment.
The huge fanbase of the romance novel and 2004 hit film may initially boost the box office, but it will take more than just a re-creation of that famous rainstorm to attract other theatergoers looking for more than just clichés, tropes and riffs.
The story begins in a nursing home where elderly Noah (Darian Harewood) faithfully reads from his diary to his wife, Allie (Marian Plunkett), who suffers from dementia. Noah hopes that the tale in the notebook, which tells the story of their great love, will spark her memory and bring her back to him at least one more time. Is there any doubt that will happen by the end of the show?
The notebook’s narrative tells of their relationship from first meeting to separation to reunion to marriage to old age. The journey is depicted using interwoven, non-linear flashbacks, centering around their teenage pasts (John Cardoza and Jordan Tyson) and then, nearly a decade later, their younger years (Ryan Vasquez and Joey Woods).
She’s a rich girl on summer vacation. He is a poor local boy. She thinks he’s cute and he thinks she’s beautiful. They fall in love immediately, but her parents bring the girl back home before things get worse. (Too late.)
Each of them thinks that the other has forgotten the other, and years pass. But before her wedding to suave lawyer Lon (Chase Del Rey), she decides to return to the place where it all began after seeing a newspaper article about a house he spent years fixing up — and, as it turns out, eagerly. Her all the time.
But to be invested in endless love, the audience must first believe in it. In the screenplay by Bekah Brunstetter (“This is Us”), there is no “Titanic”-like connection between these two class-mixed lovers: no charm, no complexity, nothing special.
In essence, these two have little in common except for banal exchanges and cute gestures. He admires one of her paintings. She loves to play his guitar. When she later accuses him of not knowing who she really is, we know what she means, though the same could be said about her—and the audience—about them.
The show, which was delayed due to the pandemic and was released in 2022 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, updates the time period of the novel from the 1940s to the 1970s and then extends it to the present. But if there are no references about Vietnam, you’ll be at a loss to identify the story’s eras — or to pinpoint the story’s setting, which the show refers to as “a port city in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” The David Zinn and Brett J. Panakis collection reflects this mysterious sense of place.
This sense of everywhere/nowhere is reflected in the new score by indie singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, the singer-songwriter whose tunes have been featured in the TV series “Grey’s Anatomy.” It’s sweet enough, gentle, and often full of introspective lyrics. But for a musical, there is little difference in tone or text, which is full of direct emotion.
However, this clarity may be the key to its popularity – and perhaps here too. The romantic duo appear as blank slates onto which the audience can project themselves, bathed in nostalgia by summer sunsets and moonlit nights, wonderfully provided by lighting designer Ben Stanton.
The novel and film certainly highlight the definition of ordinariness (although Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling in the film take ordinary to a different level). Perhaps this small, intimate musical would do the same here, but would likely land better on tour where the magic bar is lower.
As for the production, the staging by Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “Next to Normal”) and Shell Williams (“The Wiz”) feels, despite its intimate intent, contrived and unsurprising. For a while, the juxtaposition of the three couples chasing each other was interesting, but soon Katie Spellman’s choreography of past and future lives circling each other always became a one-note dizzying effect.
The casting of interracial couples nicely underscores the universality of romance and the ease of musical theater’s imaginative leaps.
Plunkett and Harwood bring quiet compassion and authenticity as eldest Noah and Allie. Plunkett is particularly poignant as she struggles with her memories with confusion, curiosity and fear, but she also reveals glimpses of an equally sarcastic self, the person she used to be.
Vasquez and Woods have a good voice and bring a bit of humor and charm to their reunion scene. However, Cardoza and Tyson face the heavy burden as the teenage couple who must embark on an epic romance — but have little in the way of script or song to launch them across the decades.
Andrea Burns as Allie’s mother (and head nurse) is an assured presence, but she doesn’t have a song to give another perspective on the central character, which feels like a loss. Carson Stewart brings a welcome sense of whimsy and fun as a healthcare worker.
But without major characters, story, or high-profile songs, this love story remains not just leaden but as bland as a diary entry.