Review: Broadway Breathes New Life Into 'The Notebook'

New musicals that are adaptations of popular films that were based on books abound. The Devil Wears Prada, The Outsiders, Water for Elephants, The Color Purple, Matilda, and The Bridges of Madison County are but a few that have emerged in the last 12 years. Much rarer are those that actually improve upon their source material. The Notebook is one of those exceptional musicals.

The excellent first national tour of this 2024 Broadway musical based on the bestselling 1996 romance novel by Nicholas Sparks that was adapted into a popular 2004 film (currently in production at DeVos Hall in Grand Rapids) doesn’t reimagine the story but it expands its possibilities and meaning in the telling.

This is adaptation at its finest. To amplify and develop the source material through the particulars of its art form is almost magical.

The story of The Notebook, though beloved, is widely known as a treacly, tear-jerking romance. Told as a dual narrative, Noah, an elder man, reads the story of their lives to Allie, his wife who’s in residence at a long-term memory care facility.

From the moment they met as teenagers and made a promise to each other, to the twists and turns that kept them apart—their forced separation because of class differences, her parents’ disapproval and intervention, his going to war, her engagement to another man—to their unlikely reunion and difficult choices, the memories spring to life through the literal reading of the tale meant to spark the elder Allie’s memory and bring her back to Noah amid the dramas of acute aging at the end of their lives.

The plot is largely unchanged; however, in the musical adaptation, with book by Bekah Brunstetter, music and lyrics by once pop hitmaker Ingrid Michaelson, and direction from Michael Greif and Schele Wiliams, this romance becomes a much larger, deeply affecting meditation on the passage of time, the promises we make (and can’t keep), grief and loss, and the longing for home. The romance between two people is transformed into a romance with life itself. 

The magic of that larger meaning happens in the way the story is told. The narrative jumps around in time, and three different couples: younger, middle age, and elder Allie and Noah get to be present to each other across time and space, often singing to and with each other in ways we all wish we could speak to our younger selves, go back in time, and then jump back into the present.

Unlike in the film, there’s no mystery that the elder Noah and Allie are the same couple as those in the budding romance, and in the musical, it’s a somewhat unfortunate given that they are star-crossed from the start in that there’s so little development of the relationship, by the third song (of 23), they’re promising to carry each other home, forever. And in the musical they lose the charmingly passionate truculence between them evident in the film and book that offers much-needed interpersonal tension. 

The central tension in the musical is the inevitability of time, made clear by the nonlinear narrative shifts, the ways in which the characters at different ages look back on themselves, and the haunting song lyrics “Time, time, time, was never mine, mine, mine” and “Where did all the days go when I used to burn so bright?” among them. And though there isn’t a single song or melody that is memorable to the point of humming that tune after leaving the theater, the feeling of those moving melodies and often exquisite harmonies lasts.

This is thanks, largely, to wonderful performances, from the excellent orchestra conducted by Alexandra Golden, as well as the actors. The entire ensemble is marvelous, most notably Makena Jackson and her big voice as younger Allie, as well as Ken Wulf Clark as an utterly charming middle Noah, who can bend a note in a way that will break your heart. The elder couple, played with aplomb and deep emotion by John Rubinstein and Angela Birchett, are so utterly convincing in their acting, they create a beautiful and necessary anchor for this tale.

Also most notable is the incredible achievement of the technical elements and the profound way they shape the narrative and its meaning. The action unfolds across an expanse of time and place, each gloriously distinct, from the interior of a hospital to the porch of a restored old house, to a dock at the water’s edge, and, yes, a rainstorm. David Zinn and Brettt J. Banakis’s set—with walls flown in, rooms rolled in, and a mammoth home exterior with magical cut outs—is truly marvelous. And bold, inventive lighting design by Ben Stanton shows us not just where to look, but how to feel amid all these exquisite shifts and changes that add up to far more than the sum of their parts.

This phenomenon is also echoed in the Coda finale wherein the whole company sings lyrics and moments from the entire show as Noah and Allie’s lives flash before their lives one last time, asking “Where do we go when we go?” And “Will you remember me?”

It all goes by so fast. You don’t want it to end. Just like a life lived well.

The Notebook 
DeVos Performance Hall
Oct. 13-18
grandrapids.broadway.com