The Notebook
Opening Night: March 14, 2024
Theater: Gerald Schoenfeld
Website: notebookmusical.com
The Notebook is a new musical based on the best selling novel that inspired the iconic film. Allie and Noah, both from different worlds, share a lifetime of love despite the forces that threaten to pull them apart, in a deeply moving portrait of the enduring power of love.
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March 14, 2024
In any case, the de-slicking was a mistake; it turns out that the Hollywood varnish was the only thing holding the picture together. In its place, the musical makes few convincing arguments for a separate existence.
March 15, 2024
A show this steeped in grief and heartbreak has never felt so damn good.
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March 14, 2024
Based on Nicholas Sparks’ 1996 bestseller about a young – then older, then much older – couple who survive a lifetime of tribulations (until they don’t), the musical opening tonight at the Schoenfeld Theatre is the theatrical equivalent of muzak, comforting in its unapologetically manipulative way and unabashed in its disregard for anything approaching the grit of the real world.
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March 14, 2024
Your milage may vary. My husband was a wreck after just the first act, but I wasn’t as moved by the musical as I was the film, a form that is simultaneously more intimate and frighteningly real.
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March 14, 2024
Much beloved is the 2004 movie version in which an old man tries to reawaken his wife’s memory by reading aloud from her notebook. The new musical gets half the story right. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong half. Or the wrong third, as it turns out in this unusually cast production.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 14, 2024
To the great credit of everyone involved, “The Notebook” also delivers unexpectedly sophisticated theatricality with the requisite supercharging of the tear ducts, notwithstanding an archly familiar narrative.
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This may put me in the minority, given the story’s proven success in other mediums, but for all its sweetness and polish “The Notebook” never rises to truly transporting heights—except when Ms. Plunkett, as the heroine, Allie, in her later years, and Dorian Harewood, as her husband, Noah, are the focus.
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March 14, 2024
A shrug from a tear-stained shoulder is certainly not the worst way to exit a musical, so even if The Notebook isn’t reinventing any wheels, it turns them with earnest, somehow not-too-sentimental, precision.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 14, 2024
As with the film, the musical adaptation of The Notebook is like a Hallmark card, its sweeping romance sparkly enough to mostly distract from its imperfections. What you’ll remember decades from now is Joy Woods’s ability to soar through the stratosphere.
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March 14, 2024
Because as elegantly staged as “The Notebook” is by co-directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams, and despite boasting an appealing cast, the show amounts to a series of un-involving pencil sketches rather than a layered portrait of a decades-long love.
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