Ensemble Arts Philly and the Shubert Organization present the national tour of The Notebook

Of course, I do know the characters on stage to some degree—you’d almost have to, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 30 years. The weepy romance novel by Nicholas Sparks launched a thousand book clubs before being adapted into a perennially popular movie in 2004. The current stage version played a nine-month engagement on Broadway before hitting the road.

Treacly and generic

Composer Ingrid Michaelson and librettist Bekah Brunstetter clearly bank on their audience’s existing associations with the material to buoy their treacly, generalized adaptation. As a musical, The Notebook retains all the sentimentality of its sources, but it lacks any of the charm, chemistry, or passion that made the other versions into fan favorites.

A lack of specificity emerges as the prevailing culprit here. The Notebook tells the swelling story of Noah and Allie, a pair of star-crossed teenage lovers who manage to reunite and build a life together against the odds. The story begins at their end, where Allie lives with dementia, unable to recognize her devoted partner. In an attempt to waken her memory, Noah reads her their own history as if it were a paperback romance.

Trifurcated lovers

We meet Noah and Allie at three distinct points in their lives, and in the musical, they are played by three sets of performers: Kyle Mangold and Chloë Cheers in youth; Ken Wulf Clark and Alysha Deslorieux in middle age; and Beau Gravitte and Sharon Catherine Brown in twilight. (At the opening night performance in Philly, understudies Samatha Rios and Alex Benoit performed as Young Allie and Middle Noah, respectively.) This trifurcation has worked in other recent musicals—chiefly, the brilliant Fun Home—but it adds a fuzziness here that is never overcome.

The focus never lands on any of the pairs long enough for us to truly understand Noah and Allie as people—why they’re interesting to each other, and why their love should be interesting to us. Instead, we get shorthand. Allie is passionate and rebellious; Noah is sensitive and grounded. When they reunite in their 30s, on the eve of Allie’s planned wedding to another man, their desires overtake them. But there’s no buildup to that moment. It simply happens.

Co-directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams produce some evocative stage tableaux, particularly when you can watch the different generations of the same couple observing each other. But detailed actor work never fully emerges. This seems most evident in the performances of Gravitte and Brown, who have fewer songs to rely on—he comes across as too hale and hearty to convince as an increasingly frail man, while she simply seems disconnected.

Bland book and lyrics

Brunstetter, whose television credits include This Is Us and the recently released The Five-Star Weekend, supplies cliché-ridden dialogue that sounds wooden in the mouths of her characters. (Allie’s forbidding mother, played by Anne Tolpegin, tells her daughter that she “knows boys like that,” for example.) Contemporary scenes set in the care facility where Noah and Allie now live betray a condescending and patronizing attitude toward aging and infirmity.

Michaelson’s score leans toward the bland singer-songwriter genre, with some lyrics that are risibly pedestrian. (I had to stifle a laugh when Middle Allie sings that Noah “smells good / like wood.”) Much of the music is fragmentary and attempts to do the work of dialogue and character-building, but instead engenders a frustrating stop-and-start feeling. The eleven-o’clock number, an anthem for Allie called “My Days”, attempts to shove an evening’s worth of development into three-and-a-half minutes.

Longing for the original

The Academy of Music feels too big for the intimacies of this story, and on opening night, several technical issues persisted throughout the performance—particularly missed or delayed lighting cues that made the proceedings look shockingly pedestrian. (The lighting design is by Ben Stanton.) The slightly abstract set, by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis, seems dwarfed by the dimensions of the large stage.

In recounting the winding path of life, Allie sings at one point about wanting “to go back to the good old days.” After seeing The Notebook, you may want to go back too: to the novel and film that do a much better job telling this beloved story.

At top: Alysha Deslorieux (Middle Allie) and Ken Wulf Clark (Middle Noah) in the national tour of ‘The Notebook’. (Photo by Roger Mastroianni.)

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