Review: THE NOTEBOOK at Pantages Theatre

Got those tissues ready? Hopefully so because once the lights go down, the Nicholas Sparks machine expects you will need them by the boxful.

Some audiences just might. The national tour of THE NOTEBOOK: THE MUSICAL contains enough of the necessary ingredients, and pushes the appropriate buttons to get the ultra-romantic of us to submit to this story yet again. Between Ingred Michelson’s heart-swelling score, a safe and steady book by Bekah Brunstetter and the co-direction of Michael Greif and Schele Williams, this entertaining but hardly remarkable tale kicks off the 2026 season at the Hollywood Pantages on an appropriately tear-streaked note.

Must-see? Not hardly! There’s some lovely interplay between practiced stage vets Sharon Catherine Brown and Beau Gravitte; a song titled “My Days” on which actress Alysha Deslorieux (playing the middle version of our heroine) unleashes her inner Idina Menzel, and some very pretty people of both genders chasing each other across the stage shot through with autumnal shafts of light supplied by lighting designer Ben Stanton. And there’s the now quite familiar story of THE NOTEBOOK which kinda sorta wants to be ROMEO AND JULIET all grown up and with one of these great lovers suffering dementia and the other facing a stroke.   

The Michelson-Brunstetter musical is now two steps away – and nearly 30 years! - from the dawn of this soggy tale of a love so deep and eternal that it can survive the death of memory. In 2004, we got the Nick Cassavetes-directed film, the one that also gave us Gena Rowlands, James Garner and, oh yes, the hot pairing of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The construction of Jen Sardi and Jeremy Leven’s film script allowed for the filmed NOTEBOOK to contain a bit of a twist. No such narrative dexterity here as to who our players are and what they’re all about. Basically, it’s love, devotion, sob, regret, love again, then rinse and repeat.

In the present, in a nursing home, we meet a kind and caring old man named Noah (played by Gravitte) who makes a routine of reading a love story written in a notebook to Allie Brown), a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s. The woman is barely responsive or outright hostile to the nursing home caregivers, and she bristles occasionally at Noah who says he’s her “old friend.” But she gets into the tale he is recounting and wants to hear it again and again. Because, of course even though she doesn’t remember, Noah is telling her story and as it’s unfolding, out come the two younger versions of herself – ages 17 and 27 (played by Chloe Cheers and Alysha Deslorieux) along with the two corresponding younger Noahs (Kyle Mangold and Ken Wulf Clark with Jesse Corbin performing for Wulf on opening night).

During her family’s vacation at the end of high school on some unnamed coastal town, young Allie and Noah meet and fall immediately in love. Her parents have money and she’s bound for college; he’s working class, meaning their relationship is problematic. (Not that this is ever called out in any way, but Allie is the daughter of mixed-race parents played by Anne Tolpegin and Jerome Harmann-Hardeman, while Noah is white.) Despite her parents’ best efforts to thwart the romance – including taking Allie away, Noah promises to restore a shambling old house for her, and to write letters to her daily.

A decade later, when a now 27-year-old Allie finds her way back to the same town, she discovers Noah - returned from Vietnam - and the house both waiting for her. This is problematic again because, although she has never forgotten Noah and falls swooningly back in lust with him (he had never stopped) Allie is happily engaged to another man, Lon (Jesse Corbin).

Well, since it’s revealed that Noah has basically been living in this nursing home to be close to Allie, there’s no suspense over Allie’s choice back in the ‘70s. Rather, the clock is ticking over Allie’s mental decline and Noah’s physical frailty. Is he going to finish reading the pages of the notebook (a story that Allie has promised will “bring me back” to Noah) before she is too far gone and before he’s took weak to tell it. A goofy but well-meaning physical therapist named Johnny (Connor Richardson) steps in to help after Noah takes a turn for the worse.

Other than a couple of moments during their youth when they get show a little bit of defiance (Allie) or blue-collar pride (Noah), these are never particularly layered characters. Gravitte and Brown are engaging and sweetly affecting  in the Older Noah/Allie scenes where he’s trying so desperately hard to break through. Tolpegin also registers some believable moments as Allie’s mother and a sympathetic but no-nonsense administrator in Allie’s nursing home.

The musical adaptation of any major motion picture will garner a certain amount of attention, especially when you’ve got the never-idle Michael Greif as one of the directors. Not sure what sparked his Spark. Apart from RENT, Greif’s best musicals have revolved around complicated or twisted characters facing crossroads – people like the bipolar Diana of NEXT TO NORMAL, the Beales of GREY GARDENS and Evan Hansen. Greif will be represented at the Pantages again in May when the national tour of HELL’S KITCHEN comes through town, concurrent to his work on a new musical BASURA with composers Gloria and Emilia Estefan at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta.

THE NOTEBOOK: THE MUSICAL plays through Jan. 25 at  6223 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 

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