The musical version of “The Notebook” returns to Chicago, where it received its world premiere at Chicago Shakespeare in the fall of 2022, now in a post-Broadway national tour.
I’m not quite sure whether the show has changed or I have — or more likely, a swirling combination of changes in time, cast, theater venue, expectations and more — but the show makes a different and less striking impression.
Based on the bestselling, tearjerking novel by Nicholas Sparks about a love story that begins in youth and ends in elderly dementia — made even more famous by the 2004 film version starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams — the musical has a score by multiplatinum indie singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson and a book by Bekah Brunstetter (Emmy-nominated producer and writer for the TV show “This Is Us”), both of which made some bold choices.
Rather than a straightforward narrative, Brunstetter leaned into the conceptual frame of the story, in which the older Noah (Beau Gravitte) reads to his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife Allie (Sharon Catherine Brown) from the titular notebook Allie wrote before she descended into complete forgetfulness. The idea is that the memories of their rocky but deep love story will “bring her back” to Noah.
Brunstetter, with help from directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams, creates a memory-scape where three versions of the couple — as teenagers (Kyle Mangold and Makena Jackson), as late twentysomethings (Ken Wulf Clark and Alysha Deslorieux) and as the elderly couple in a nursing home — move fluidly on and offstage throughout, often even sharing songs.
And those songs from Michaelson focus on the smaller, individual moments, often with characters talking (that is, singing) to themselves, trying to understand their own complex emotions more than freely expressing undying devotion or heartache.
In 2022, this thoughtful, somewhat quiet and fragmented take on time, memory, life and love came off as deeply meditative and somehow spot-on for the moment, infused with the lingering loneliness of the pandemic.
To this day, I recall the quality of its wistful sentiment above all, easily forgiving all the sacrifices it made to express it. By splitting Noah and Allie each into three figures, and using cross-racial casting such that Noah and Allie were each played by a Caucasian actor at one point and a Black actor at another, the show kept us at a remove from the characters in a traditional sense. It felt purposefully archetypal and atemporal.
Then the show went to Broadway in 2024, and despite the fact that the very essence of the approach was emotional restraint, the producers sold commemorative tissue boxes for audience members to buy. The show played for about nine months, certainly qualifying as a commercial disappointment.
And now the tour feels a bit like a reversion to the Broadway mean, even the subdued songs pushing for climactic wells of emotion and ending with a rhythmic light cue. The songs used to be so clearly in Michaelson’s voice — conversational, sweetly melancholy — and now I’m not sure I’d even recognize her as so clearly hers. Even the casting has changed to be more literal — in this version, Noah is white and Allie is Black. There’s more continuity and consistency, but it’s a lot less interesting. The ending has been changed and is now less potent, more hopeful.
Still, I have a soft spot for this show, and the capable cast here delivers plenty of believable and affecting moments. As Older Noah, Gravitte carries the emotional weight of the tale with just the right sense of weathered, waning faith that Allie will recognize him. Deslorieux as Middle Allie provides a sturdy center for the love story itself, as she works through the layered complexities of hurting an innocent fiancé, disobeying parents and risking security for a passion that stings as much as it exhilarates.
I’m also intrigued to be thinking about my memory of — and past feelings for — a show that is so much about memory and how it can sustain us.
My opinion of “The Notebook” has changed. My memory of its meaningfulness back in 2022 remains real.