‘The Notebook’ review: A musical transformation of sorts

The problem with musicals spun from popular books and movies is that too often all they’re trying to do is re-create the experience of fans in a new medium. The result is an inferior copy of the original. But what can anyone expect when the ultimate goal is to cash in on a valuable IP?

The artistic challenge, of course, is transformation, not cloning. A musical operates in a different mode from a literary or cinematic work and therefore can’t help but tell a unique version of the story.

I didn’t see “The Notebook” when it premiered on Broadway in 2024 to mixed reviews. I also confess to never having read Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling novel, on which the musical is based. And only recently did I catch up with Nick Cassavetes’ 2004 film starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and then I must admit only to prepare for the musical’s Los Angeles premiere at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

With Gosling and McAdams in captivating flight on screen, it’s easy to buy into the mythic love of Noah and Allie, the couple at the center of the shameless and (yes, I’ll admit it) shamelessly enjoyable romantic fantasy. Gosling has a way of retreating into a silence more emotionally eloquent than the film’s occasionally clunky dialogue. McAdams, by contrast, makes a giddy racket that betrays feelings her characters can neither fully understand nor contain.

I wasn’t expecting the actors cast in these roles at the Pantages, where the musical opened Wednesday, to compare in magnetism or intensity to their movie star predecessors. Fortunately, the way the musical is written by Ingrid Michaelson (music and lyrics) and Bekah Brunstetter (book), they don’t really have to.

Three actors play Noah and three play Allie at different times in the couple’s lives. Younger Noah (Kyle Mangold) and younger Allie (Chloë Cheers) are the teenagers who fall heedlessly in love despite the differences in their background. Allie’s wealthy parents (played by a piquant Anne Tolpegin and Jerome Harmann-Hardeman) don’t want their college-bound daughter to throw her life away on a lumberyard Romeo with no educational or financial prospects.

Middle Noah (the role was played by Jesse Corbin at the reviewed performance) and middle Allie (Alysha Deslorieux) reunite after years of separation to see if their adolescent passion still burns. Allie is on the brink of marrying another man, but she returns to find Noah living in the historic house that he promised one day would be their home. He’s restored the place in the hope that she would come back to him, doubling the stakes with a gorgeous piece of real estate that she can no more resist than his dreamy devotion.

The exact relationship between Older Noah (Beau Gravitte) and Older Allie (Sharon Catherine Brown) is withheld for a bit. Allie, suffering from dementia, is in a care center. Noah, who has his own health issues, visits her to read from a notebook the story that she set down on paper to prevent her from forgetting the love that illuminated her life. He believes that what’s recorded in the notebook will bring her back to him, if only flickeringly, before time runs out for both of them.

As Noah reads to Allie, their younger selves emerge on stage to enact the depicted scenes. The musical’s handling of the romance is condensed in the early going. The younger versions of Noah and Allie, callow and skittish, are laid out in broad strokes. Mangold has a showy falsetto that heightens Noah’s vulnerable longing, but the duets with Cheers’ Allie aren’t lyrically sophisticated enough to provide the relationship with much depth.

There’s a generic quality both to singer-songwriter Michaelson’s score (a combination of folk and Broadway pop) and to a romance that seems almost mystically predestined.

Corbin’s Noah is the strong, silent, sexy type; Deslorieux’s Allie is as delicate as she is willful. One hopes that they will make the right choice and choose each other, but lyrics such as “Sometimes I feel like I lost my only voice./But then I realized, only I can choose my choice” don’t give Deslorieux all that much to work with in the big second act number “My Days.”

Sharon Catherine Brown (Older Allie) and “The Notebook” North American tour company.

(Roger Mastroianni)

The connection between Middle Noah and Middle Allie is steamy, sometimes comically so, as when Allie caresses the table that Noah admits he made by hand. Their love scene in the rain, while obviously less visually spectacular than in the film, plunges headlong into romantic cliches that manage to get the job done despite their obviousness.

The direction of Michael Greif and Schele Williams valiantly tries to contain the material’s hokiness without undercutting the wishfulness that lies at the heart of the story’s broad emotional appeal. They succeed in limiting the amount of audience eye-rolling, but they can’t supply the texture and novelty that are absent from the musical.

The one notable area of improvement on the movie is in the handling of the older Noah and Allie storyline. Brunstetter (a successful TV writer whose hot-topic play “The Cake” made the rounds a few years ago) mitigates some of the sentimental excesses that fly in the face of medical reality.

Not all the changes are to the musical’s advantage. The setting is now a coastal town in the Mid-Atlantic where the film has a more explicit Southern charm. The period, too, has been revised. Noah now serves in the Vietnam War instead of World War II. These historical alterations may have been to allow for cross-racial casting. But the characters don’t really seem rooted to any particular time and place. They’ve just been re-slotted into a Broadway limbo.

But the musical does manage to pull off one genuine transformation. The authors have structured the work as a triple helix, and some of the most powerful moments occur when all three incarnations of the characters are on stage at the same time.

“The Notebook” on screen injected new life into a formulaic love story. Brunstetter and Michaelson refocus the work to be more about time. The bond between Noah and Allie is a prism through which to experience both the transience and the permanence of what matters most to us in life. In the face of disappearance, something mysterious endures.