NEW YORK — The romantic tearjerker “The Notebook” lands on Broadway in awkward musical theater form this spring having previously conquered books and movies. It is intent now on making a live audience openly weep by employing massive doses of schlocky sentimentality without the aid of Ryan Gosling.
The bombastic musical that opened Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre is about a love for the ages but has understated songs by Ingrid Michaelson, who offers coffee house vibes instead of passion’s thunder. The book by Bekah Brunstetter loses gas well before it’s over and piles on the melodrama.
This adaptation from a Nicholas Sparks novel is the love story of poor boy Noah Calhoun and rich girl Allie Hamilton, told as the elderly narrator reads the story to his elderly wife with Alzheimer’s, the two later revealed to be the young couple of the story, whose passion was interrupted by meddling parents.
For the stage, three sets of multicultural Noahs and Allies have been hired for different stages — there’s inflation even on Broadway — so that at some points there are six people on stage representing our central couple, a somewhat diffusing effect. Luckily, the boys are dressed in brown and the girls in blue, like in kindergarten. It’s a bad sign when your Broadway musical needs color cues to distinguish the cast.
Directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams as well as choreographer Katie Spelman seem to complicate the visuals by rushing everyone around in a breathless whirl, saying, in effect, that what love really does is make you want to sprint.
The older couple (Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood) rarely leave the stage, weirdly hanging around to watch their younger selves, with elderly Noah supposedly reading from his notebook to trigger his wife’s memory. This effect is also used in the Neil Diamond musical and it’s just creepy, pulling focus and complicating the scenes.
The film’s chronological timeline has been shattered, which is a…
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