Few headed to see “The Notebook,” the new Broadway-bound musical trying out at Chicago Shakespeare Theater based on the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel and the hit 2004 movie, will be expecting a score quite like the one penned by Ingrid Michaelson.
It’s an absolutely gorgeous suite of songs, landing somewhere between Duncan Sheik, Jeanine Tesori and Sara Bareilles. The music is romantic and emotionally charged, as you might expect from this particular title, but Michaelson also knows how to inject dramatic drivers into ballads of self-reflection — so much so that their pace grips and holds you, pulling you into the story so that you empathize with its lovers at different stage of their lives.
Better yet, Michaelson, the latest in an exciting progression of female songwriting talents to turn to Broadway, knows how to harness the power of the simple, universal, sensual lyric: “Kiss me my on neck,” say, “on my forehead. On my mouth. The mouth. The mouth.”
Add to that a new book from Bekah Brunstetter that carries that idea into the gentle, lovely text you are hearing (“How did I become you?,” a middle-age character asks her younger self). Potentially mawkish sentimentality is avoided in favor of a heart-rendering show, a show that both targets the very women who love this book and movie, and brings dating couples closer together. These are not exactly the halcyon days of romantic musicals — the American theater is too fraught for its own health — but this one manages to find a way through to the universal feelings on which the show depends.
Racial issues are the third rail of American theater right now. Co-directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams cast without regard to race except when the show wants to gently acknowledge race and it works beautifully, as a Black actress morphs into another Black actress into a white actress, all playing the same character, all with the same struggles. And so it goes, on a somewhat different track, with her lost lover, variously played by John Cardoza, Ryan Vasquez and Jerome Harmann-Hardeman. (Harmann-Hardeman is technically the understudy, but he has been in for a long time and is excellent.) The show offers a vision of America in which the people who will come to this show, destined for productions from sea to shining sea, will fervently want to believe.
And who can blame them? “The Notebook,” which is all about following your heart and fighting for the person you really love even as life carries you away from them, is built on idealism.
I’ve long thought that the reason that “Rent” changed the history of musical theater forever was because Greif, who can be dry, acerbic and hard-edged, was the director and was the perfect counterpoint to Jonathan Larson’s unbridled emotionalism. So it goes here: Greif and Williams’ staging, which already is exquisite in places, prevents potentially pulpy content from bathing in its own sentiment. They do this by focusing the show relentlessly on mortality, by revealing the pain of being old, by presenting characters who can be closed off to their own emotions, by reminding us that once we’ve made a mistake, its consequences can last for years and, above all, by really showing what it is like to fight the decay of your own mind.
Their principal ally in this is Maryann Plunkett, playing a woman fighting to recover her own memories and offering up as rich a portrayal of a woman with dementia as I ever have seen. The contrast between Plunkett and both Jordan Tyson and Joy Woods is just so rich, and yet, thanks to Greif and Williams, you believe they’re all the same person.
Act 1 is in excellent shape, although it could beef up the sensuality people have come to see. Act 2, which needs more time to breathe as the plot speeds up (always an issue with musicals based on movies), needs some attention at the climax of the piece, which is, of course, about the recovery of memory. That potentially transformative moment is not set up right yet, and it gets lost. Plunkett is not allowed to get the focus that the character needs in that moment — which might be one moment but also happens to be the single most important one.
This is, of course, “The Notebook,” famed for sultry rain-assisted lovemaking between characters played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. It’s not “Hadestown.” There will be detractors. The producers, led by Kevin McCollum, will be able to ignore them as people show up at the box office and, even before that, when some hunks with boldfaced names see the benefit of taking off their shirt in such a classy show.
Truly, though, the musical, which is not to be missed by those who follow new musicals in Chicago, is far more about how much youth is wasted on the young; it is a show suffused with what Edward Albee called “the 360 degrees view” of middle age, looking back at early mistakes and forward, with some dread, at what might lie ahead. And those are precisely the people who come to Broadway musicals.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Notebook” (4 stars)
When: Through Oct. 30
Where: Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $45-$125 at 312-595-5600 and chicagoshakes.com
