Three Couples, Zero Accumulation

With a score that forgets to remember,
The Notebook drowns in its own mawkish bathwater

There’s a musical version of The Notebook that might actually work. A decades-spanning romance built on longing, separation, and fading memory? That’s theater. What’s currently stinking up the Hollywood Pantages? That’s a $30 million hostage situation disguised as entertainment.

The touring production of The Notebook: The Musical transforms Nicholas Sparks’ weepy bestseller into Broadway roadkill. All the recognizable bits are there, splattered across the stage in their Sunday best, but whatever made this thing move got left somewhere around Kansas. Director Michael Greif and Schele Williams, working from Ingrid Michaelson‘s soggy pop score and Bekah Brunstetter‘s exposition-drunk book, have created a show that mistakes brand recognition for actual storytelling. Watching this is like being cornered at a party by someone describing their favorite movie in excruciating detail while you eye the exits.

 Chloë Cheers (Younger Allie) and Kyle Mangold (Younger Noah)

The conceit: Noah and Allie appear in three versions across their lives. Young lovers (Chloë Cheers and Kyle Mangold) meet cute in that special way people do when a script holds a gun to their heads. 28-year old versions (Alysha Deslorieux and Jesse Corbin (understudying Ken Wulf Clark on opening night) face consequences, or would if the show bothered to dramatize any. Elderly versions (Sharon Catherine Brown and Beau Gravitte) occupy a memory care facility where Noah reads their story from the titular prop while Alzheimer’s devours his wife’s mind. Eventually Noah has a stroke, sneaks out to find Allie one last time (hospital security apparently clocks out at 8), she suddenly remembers everything in defiance of how dementia actually works, and they die holding hands while the company sings about eternal love. I half expected someone to walk onstage selling term life insurance.

On paper, it tracks. Onstage, it’s pointless.

The cardinal sin is gutting the story while keeping its skeleton, then charging you $91-$248 (or so) to watch the bones rattle around in expensive lighting. The novel and 2004 film worked because they earned their tears through accumulation: years apart; letters not received; Allie constructing a separate life; Noah rebuilding an old house for them board by board like a romantic masochist with a Home Depot card. That slow accrual of time and loss gave the reunion heft and the ending inevitability. This musical strips out nearly all of it, apparently banking on audiences remembering the movie and filling in the gaps themselves. It’s a theatrical Mad Lib where you supply all the good parts.

Ken Wulf Clark (Middle Noah) and Alysha Deslorieux (Middle Allie)

Major events get compressed into thirty-second scenes or dumped via exposition delivered with all the subtlety of a freight train hitting a henhouse. The breakup? We’re told it happened. Noah’s war service? Mentioned in passing, as if a war were an inconvenient dentist appointment. The house restoration (the central metaphor of the entire story) becomes a prop gag. The death of a close friend, Fin, is tossed off like someone mentioning they forgot to buy milk. I’ve had more emotional investment in spam emails. Middle Allie’s engagement materializes from nowhere, unsupported by anything resembling dramatic foundation.

The show tells rather than shows, yet remains confusing even for someone like me who has seen the movie seventeen times. Time lurches forward without warning. Characters vanish before registering as anything more than vague shapes in period costume. Years evaporate mid-scene. For the uninitiated, it’s incomprehensible. For fans, it’s a montage without the movie, all the iconic moments presented like taxidermy in a roadside attraction: recognizable but dead and slightly unsettling. Every big emotional beat lands with the impact of a gas station greeting card.

Beau Gravitte (Older Noah) and Sharon Catherine Brown (Older Allie)

This is why the ending falls completely flat despite being faithful to Sparks. The show wants you sobbing at Noah and Allie’s final reunion, practically begging for tears like a toddler demanding candy. We’re told their love runs deep. Repeatedly. With increasing desperation. But we’re never shown why. What should devastate instead feels vaguely pretty and spiritually vacant.

Michaelson’s score doubles down on the same mistake with impressive confidence. Her Broadway-pop numbers are pleasant enough in isolation but won’t advance the story or tell you anything about who these people are. They just circle vague feelings, hammering simple phrases until meaning evaporates and you start mentally composing your grocery list. “Sadness and Joy,” sung by the young couple, gets the title repeated so relentlessly the words become abstract noise. Across two hours, there isn’t a single melody or lyric that lodges in memory, which is honestly an achievement when you’re adapting a story literally about the importance of remembering things.

Sharon Catherine Brown (Older Allie) and The Notebook Tour Company

“If This Is Love” cycles endlessly through variations on the same question without arriving anywhere. By the end, it’s writerly paralysis set to music, the sound of someone who’s never been in love trying hard to imagine what it might feel like based on a thesaurus entry. “I Wanna Go Back,” sung by the middle and younger Allies, gestures toward something interesting (aging, memory loss, the terror of disappearing) then immediately settles for repetition. Lines that might have carried weight get beaten to death.

Katie Spelman‘s choreography offers zero help, possibly because there isn’t any. Most numbers feature no dancing whatsoever, just actors standing in place looking vaguely moved. Greif and Williams occasionally attempt something theatrical, particularly when all three couples appear simultaneously, but these moments arrive unsupported and vanish quickly.

Chloë Cheers (Younger Allie) and Kyle Mangold (Younger Noah)

The performances are vocally solid, especially Cheers and Deslorieux, who sing the hell out of material that doesn’t deserve it. But the acting style skews broad and overstated across the board, emotional volume compensating for thin material the way a bad restaurant oversalts everything. Chemistry between the 28-year-old-couple is virtually nonexistent, draining the rain scene of any tension. Watching them is like watching strangers forced to share an umbrella at a bus stop, except less erotic. Gravitte, stuck playing Older Noah, drowns in exposition and limp jokes about aging that land like lead balloons at a funeral. His scenes with Connor Richardson‘s perky physical therapist Johnny just emphasize how schematic everyone is. The actors do what they can. The material gives them nothing to play beyond earnestness.

If The Notebook has one asset, it’s money, and boy does it want you to know it. David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis deliver a massive, constantly shifting set with flying scenery, sliding walls, and enormous projection surfaces. Ben Stanton‘s lighting design is often the most expressive element onstage, using shadow and warmth to suggest emotional shifts the script doesn’t bother writing. Paloma Young‘s costumes work overtime to differentiate eras.

The Notebook Company

In its final stretch, The Notebook reveals its ugliest impulse: sanding down the hardest truths for a cleaner emotional payoff. Dementia, shown in both novel and film as erratic, cruel, and inescapable, gets reshaped here into a narrative problem that love can intermittently solve. Apparently we’re doing magical realism now and nobody told the marketing department. This fantasy crystallizes around the nurse character, played by Anne Tolpegin. When she explains (calmly, accurately) that dementia cannot be reversed, that progress isn’t linear, that hope must be reframed around comfort rather than cure, the musical positions her as an obstacle. Her realism reads as coldness. Her medical accuracy gets treated like emotional terrorism. Meanwhile Johnny, the physical therapist who thinks he can “fix” Allie by reading to her, becomes the moral center. Nothing says “inspiring” like a man who refuses to accept the limits of terminal illness.

That distortion bleeds into scenes with Allie’s family, who arrive with loud urgency and emotional need, demanding recognition from a woman whose reality is already collapsing. The actual work of dementia care involves meeting the person where they are and providing comfort. The musical turns these moments into sentimental spectacles about everyone else’s pain. Grief tourism presented as entertainment.

Sharon Catherine Brown (Older Allie) and Beau Gravitte (Older Noah)

The film includes family visits without portraying them as clueless narcissists, and it doesn’t pretend love can stabilize memory. The musical flattens this into feel-good fantasy, treating dementia less as a condition to be lived with than as a dramatic device to be temporarily conquered before curtain.

This mirrors the show’s entire approach. Time isn’t endured here; it’s skipped. Years of separation, quiet labor, emotional accumulation, all replaced by exposition and clichés. The ending remains intact but lands without gravity because the journey’s been hollowed out. What’s left is a lavish production that wants the reward of deep feeling without doing the work to earn it.

The Notebook: The Musical keeps reminding us that time is precious.
This adaptation wastes yours.
Skip it and rewatch the movie. At least Ryan Gosling knew what he was doing.

Alysha Deslorieux (Middle Allie) and Ken Wulf Clark (Middle Noah)

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photos by Roger Mastroianni

The Notebook: The Musical
North American tour
presented by Broadway in Hollywood
ends at the Hollywood Pantages January 25, 2026
2 hours 20 minutes, including intermission
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit The Notebook

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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