Interview: Anne Tolpegin of THE NOTEBOOK at Nederlander Theatre

The national tour of The Notebook will be playing at the James M. Nederlander Theatre from August 4-16, bringing the iconic love story of Allie and Noah to Chicago. 

BroadwayWorld spoke with Anne Tolpegin who plays Mother and Nurse Lori ahead of its Chicago run. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Welcome back to Chicago! You received your Bachelor’s in Performance Studies/Theatre from Northwestern, where you also participated in Northwestern’s oldest theatrical tradition, the student-written Waa-Mu Show. Do you have a favorite memory from your time at Northwestern or Chicago? 

I had a wonderful experience at Northwestern! I think my last couple of years there were probably my favorites. I just started jumping into musical theater pretty seriously then. I did a production of Bernstein's Mass directed by Dominic Missimi, and that was really my graduating from being a young inexperienced singer to just throwing myself into whatever I was asked of in musical theater. It was the first time I was learning how to belt. And it was such a gorgeous piece, and there were so many people in it from all over the school — we had a lot of musicians, we had a lot of people who were more traditional dancers, and then a lot of actors as well, and it was just such a wonderful experience. So probably Bernstein's Mass at Northwestern with Dominic was really an outstanding production to be a part of. 

We did a production of Into The Woods the summer after my senior year that was just full of people that I loved and I played the Witch. Sondheim is probably my favorite composer, so that was a really wonderful piece to get to do with all my friends. Rives Collins was our director for that. 

Then in Chicago itself, I did a number of different shows in Chicago before I left to go to New York, but probably my favorite was the regional premiere of Sondheim's Passion. That was at Pegasus Players Theatre directed by Warner Crocker, and that was an incredible experience. I was playing Fosca, and I got reviewed by Chris Jones and Hedy Weiss — it was so cool. It was just a wonderful production, very intimate production and really beautiful to be able to do that while I was in Chicago. 

You have such a rich touring history, starting with Les Mis in 1997, and since then, you’ve done Ragtime, Mamma Mia!, Billy Elliot, Kinky Boots, and now The Notebook! What’s different or special about your experience with this tour? 

This company is so wonderful because we're spread out over so many generations of age. I think our youngest is 20, just turned 21 and I won't give away our oldest’s ages, but it's up in the 70s. So it's really fun to have a wide perspective of ages and experience brought to our company, that's something that stands out for me. A lot of times you're in shows where you have a lot of people in their 20s or 30s, and that's kind of it, but this really is a wide range which allows us to access so many different perspectives, so that's been really wonderful. Also, this cast is relatively small for a musical. Our entire cast is 20 people, and I think there are only about 13 of us on stage at any one time, so it's a very intimate production. 

I really like to think of this show as being a play with music versus your standard musical. It's a beautiful story, and we tell it with music and with memory, so it's been a really wonderful experience, different from the heart-pounding theatrics of the French Revolution of Les Mis or the joyful celebration of Mamma Mia! This is a deep look into one couple's journey through their life and looking back on it and feeling present in it as you're watching it, but also realizing that this is being told by an older couple that is having some memory loss and they might be at the end of their life, so it's just got a different weight to it.

The framing device for The Notebook is an elderly man reading from a notebook to a nursing home resident. Just as it’s a story about love, it’s also a story about memories and how our hearts and bodies remember, even if our brains might forget, which is such a beautifully delicate yet tough topic. As you’re telling this story, how has it made you think about love amid the backdrop of aging and mortality? 

I lost my own mother to dementia, essentially, and I went on that journey with her, so there's a lot of my own story that I bring to this. I play Mother (Allie's mother) and Nurse Lori. In case readers don't understand what that's about, it’s because as the nurse, older Allie confuses her nurse with her mother, so they wanted the same actress to play both parts. I was able to bring a lot of my experience with my mom and with our family to my own telling of this story. It's just an incredible thing that many people in this country are dealing with in their own families or in their own lives. 

Even though the Alzheimer's and dementia part of this journey is really a part of their story, it's the focus on the richness of their life together, their journey together, their resilience together, that sort of reads through the whole story. That's the same thing that I hear audience members coming up to me after the show and saying, ‘Oh, this touched me so deeply. I remember we lost our dad to Alzheimer's and we would play music for him and he would remember dancing with our mom’ or something like that. So while it's not an easy story to tell, it's one that we know is familiar to so many of us and that people are going to recognize it. They're going to recognize their own families in this story. They're going to recognize their own love stories or the love that they hope for.

The Notebook is one of the most canon love stories in our pop culture. How do you prepare for a musical that is based off of such a popular movie and book? 

You try to not compare yourself to the book and the movie. These are very iconic features in America specifically, and probably the world, but we really just took this beautiful text that Bekah Brunstetter wrote for us — and with Nicholas Sparks's full approval and appreciation — we took that and we took this incredible material from our composer Ingrid Michaelson and tried to look at it just with letting everything else go. Not thinking so much about, ‘Is this going to feel like Rachel [McAdams] and Ryan [Gosling]?’ and really just tried to look at it for what it was in its own piece. Being able to focus on telling the story of Noah and Allie and letting everything else fall away allowed us to create this new modern take on the story. 

While we like to say that we have honored the work that came before, this is kind of the next step of it, and I also love this modernization of the actual visuals of this show. While the book and the movie were presenting this story with primarily white characters, we’ve stepped it up to allow Americans to recognize themselves in our show. So all of our Allies are women of color, all of our Noahs are white men. It's been an incredible thing to watch all these multiracial couples coming to see the show and being able to recognize themselves on stage and say, ‘That could be my story’ or ‘we see ourselves in this.’ So we took the base of this beautiful iconic story and knew that it was going to be where we were jumping from, and then we created our own take on it as we went. The music is so beautiful. It's so easy to just fall in with this incredible stuff that Ingrid has given us. And again, Bekah has written beautiful dialogue and words that just make a lot of sense to the audience and to us as actors.

The Notebook highlights some interesting dynamics regarding how class status plays a role in what relationships can take place and who you can love. You play Mother, who acts as the primary obstacle preventing this relationship between Allie and Noah because Noah is lower class. A lot has changed since the 1940s, but class and social perception still play a big role in relationships today. With the multiracial lens that you're bringing to this production as well, can you talk a little about how these themes might still resonate with today’s audiences? 

For sure, I think that's something that has been with us all throughout time, right? Who's allowed to be with whom depending on what class structure they're from, or what race they're from, or what country they're from even. Audience members are very familiar with that sort of trope. But it's interesting because our directors, Michael Greif and Schele Williams, they both really said, ‘We don't want you to focus so much on this as Mother, the fact that Noah is lower class. She doesn't see him so much like lower class; she just doesn't see him as the man who is going to be able to give the right opportunities to her daughter.’ 

I think she is aware, and we are very race specific — Mother is a white woman, she's married to a Black man, they have a biracial daughter. She's very specific in the 1960s and 70s of what sort of obstacles her daughter is already going to face in the world. In our production, Mother has clearly already broken through some standard lines of who you can be with or not. She's chosen a Black man. This wasn't necessarily something that everybody approved of at that time, but she's already done her own thing on that and gone her own way. So it's not that she doesn't think that Allie can be with whoever she wants to be with, but she is so concerned with making sure that her daughter has the best and easiest opportunities in life and she doesn't have to struggle so hard, or at least have the struggles that Mother went through. She just thinks that this young man, Noah, is not going to be able to give her what she needs or take her to the places that can really help her live her best life. So while we are trying to not play into the upper class versus lower class thing so much, it definitely is a part of it and certainly something that everyone recognizes today and probably deals with in some way in their own journey of their life and relationships and work. 

Thank you for those reflections! I really appreciate the nuances you’re bringing to this production. 

It’s important for us for Mother to not just be the bad guy. We want audiences to see her as a woman who is complex and complicated, and she's making some very hard decisions for what she believes truly will be the best for her daughter. Not to give anything away, but at the end of the show, what I'm working on very hard to do is try to apologize to Noah, and I just can't do it because I still think that what I did was right for Allie. 

So you play both Mother and Nurse Lori. What's something that you've learned from both characters as you've been playing them in these productions? 

Nurse Lori continues to teach me to work on patience, which is something that I need to work on in my own life. She’s so busy and haggard in taking care of her ward, and she has a co-worker who's called out sick and she's covering for all these people. This is another thing that's very important for us as a show. We want the caregivers of America, the caregivers of the world, to see themselves here and to see themselves being honored for the hard work that they do. Nurse Lori is running around like a crazy busy woman anyway, but she specifically is doing such hard caregiving work, so I have to remember, both in the character by the end of the show and what she teaches me, to not take the whole world on me, but just to stay present in this one moment and think, ‘Okay, what does my patient need, what is best for them.’ She's a rule follower, and at the end of the show, when Noah's saying, ‘I gotta go be with her right now, no matter what,’ she's like, ‘Okay, how can I break the rules or bend the rules to let Noah have what he needs in this present moment, which is to be with his wife while she has remembered who he is and who they are so they can have that one moment, no matter what the cost might be.’ So Nurse Lori teaches me to stay patient and to stay present.

Mother probably is teaching me as a person to try to not assign judgment on people. Obviously, we all say this, but really trying not to judge a book by its cover, or not to judge someone without fully taking a moment to really get to know them, and also not to judge people's choices. Those would be the two things from Mother. And also how to put together a fabulous country club outfit. I’m always wearing sweaters off my shoulders, which is such a fabulous fit look. I love it, so that's kind of fun for me. I take that from her. 

What do you want patrons to take away from this production of The Notebook? 

We just want people to have a wonderful moment with whomever they've come with, to celebrate either their love with that person that they're with or a memory of a family member they've lost or someone they haven't seen for a long time. One of the things that we say about the joy of taking this show around the country is that while our country is clearly struggling right now to stay unified and we’re finding lots of ways to pull apart from each other, our story really reminds people of the things that we have in common that are so strong and so important. They're things that sometimes we think are not as important, but the concept of love and commitment to someone and the resilience of a life together are things that we all honor. It’s been really lovely to bring that to audiences around the country and to remind everyone of all the things we share in common and that joy that we share. 

Thank you so much for your time, Anne! 

Of course! Can I just also say we're so excited to come to Chicago. Our company manager Michael Camp is a Chicago guy. He and I started out in theater together in Chicago, and we have a bunch of other people from Northwestern in our cast and company. It's going to be a mini homecoming for us, so it's really wonderful. And it's where our show did its first out-of-town run, so that's amazing! 

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Thank you to Anne Tolpegin and Broadway in Chicago for this interview! 

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