While the solid of “The Notebook” sings and dances up onstage on the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, there’s a good more dramatic performance occurring within the seats.
Theater review
THE NOTEBOOK
Two hours and 20 minutes, with one intermission. On the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W forty fifth Street.
The sniffle chorus.
Ingrid Michaelson’s musical, which opened Thursday night on Broadway is, after all, based on Nicholas Sparks’ weepy 1996 romance novel that was made into a preferred movie starring a young Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.
Like Pavlov’s pups, millennials habitually sob during that 2004 film, and the production has seized upon its teary status by selling branded tissue boxes. In the course of the final 10 minutes, the noses are deafening.
I believe, nevertheless, that it’s audience members’ fond memories of the movie and book, more so than the merely nice proceedings within the theater, which can be prying open their tear ducts.
Because as elegantly staged as “The Notebook” is by co-directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams, and despite boasting an appealing solid, the show amounts to a series of un-involving pencil sketches somewhat than a layered portrait of a decades-long love.
Not a single change book author Bekah Brunstetter has made improves the easy story’s effectiveness. Typically, the alterations dull its punch and switch it right into a wispy memory play. A memory for them becomes an afterthought for us.
The setting has been shifted from the South to the milder Mid-Atlantic. The characters have jumped ahead from the Forties and World War II to the tumultuous Nineteen Sixties and the moral ambiguity of Vietnam. And probably the most damaging decision of all of them: Three actors, as an alternative of two, play Noah and Allie.
Spliced over again, the audience never really gets to know them.
Connection, to state the apparent, shouldn’t be only a results of the lines characters speak or the songs they sing — we powerfully latch onto the performers who play an element. Not so here.
Unlike the sustained presence of Gosling and McAdams and their elderly counterparts within the movie, these six come and go too quickly to capture viewers’ hearts.
Actually, within the musical, the leads are really Older Noah (Dorian Harewood) and Older Allie (Maryann Plunkett). For higher or worse, they’re more distinguished on this staging than their younger selves, who they often silently observe.
Day-after-day, the person visits the lady, who suffers from dementia, in her nursing home to read aloud the identical story — the story of two teens who fall madly for each other but are kept apart by meddling parents.
More often than not, Older Allie doesn’t recognize her husband as he recounts their history. And that aspect of the show, as dementia sadly affects many, is probably the most gripping. Harewood and particularly Plunkett are tender and vulnerable without going overboard on sentiment.
Within the earliest days of their summer courtship, Noah and Allie played with vibrant voices by John Cardoza and Jordan Tyson. They flirt and splash within the pool of water on the foot of David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis’ set, which is way more beautiful than any artificial Broadway river has the fitting to be.
Allie’s domineering mother (Andréa Burns) resents Noah’s working class upbringing, and prematurely splits the duo up.
Ten years pass, and the roles are handed off to Ryan Vasquez and Joy Woods. Choreographer Katie Spelman dreamily moves the characters through time.
Although Allie is engaged to wealthy and powerful Lon (Chase Del Rey), she enthusiastically reunites with Noah, who went off to fight in Vietnam, when she spots him within the newspaper.
While the actors tap out and in, Michaelson’s rating is static — a scented candle fusion of “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Pachelbel’s Cannon.” Sweet and stringy, like brisket. Woods belts an enlivening 11 o’clock number called “My Days” that wakes us up and knocks us out with vocal pyrotechnics, if not entrancing melody.
Since the only individuals we’ve embraced over two acts are Harewood and Plunkett, the famous final moment hits home. It’s still, as Post critic Lou Lumenick said in his review of the film, “a four-hankie climax that only a stone-hearted cynic could resist.”
It’s a high note to finish on, in a book with few others.