Everyone should have a good cry now and then. It serves a heart well to get in touch with its capacity for compassion, reminding you that loss, heartbreak and confronting them are essential elements to being human.
The musical adaptation of “The Notebook” seems specifically designed for that purpose. So much so that the merchandise table at St. Paul’s Ordway Center — where its first North American tour has settled in for a fortnight — is selling $5 boxes of tissues emblazoned with the show’s logo. Unleashing the waterworks seems an obvious goal.
Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling 1996 novel and Nick Cassavetes’ 2004 film are both known for being big-time tearjerkers. But emotional engagement has a lot to do with how invested you are in the characters, and Bekah Brunstetter’s stage adaptation — propelled by the folk-rock balladry of Ingrid Michaelson — doesn’t draw an audience in as deeply as it could.
While directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams have fashioned a solidly rendered production with impressive stagecraft and performers who do about as much with the characters and songs as they can, “The Notebook” suffers from an overly simple story about two relatively generic lovers seemingly designed to establish some lowest-common-denominator connection with audiences.
That’s a flaw in Brunstetter’s writing (and perhaps Sparks’), although I give her credit for trying to add shadings through an interesting device: She divides each of the principal characters into three, showing us a couple when they first meet as teens, are reunited about a decade later, and in their final years together in assisted living, the memories eventually interweaving, the chronologies scrambled as they might be in a mind struggling with dementia.
Perhaps that tripartite split had something to do with it, but I came away from Tuesday’s opening night feeling as if I never really got to know these people. Allie and Noah come across as a couple of cute kids who have the hots for one another, but struggle against the constraints placed around Allie by her dishonest and overly class-conscious puppet master of a mother.
Yes, they dance in the rain, recreating the film’s most memorable scene. And the final exchanges between their aged incarnations have moving moments, especially when Sharon Catherine Brown eloquently expresses her memory struggles in song to Beau Gravitte, who spends much of the show injecting believable humanity into a production with a paucity of it.
Yet if there’s a profound emotional and spiritual link between Allie and Noah, we’re never made privy to it. While the lust comes through, we don’t learn enough about them to raise the stakes of a potential separation or give us a great sense of loss when their end seems near.
Hence, I’m not sure that you’ll need that trademarked box of tissues unless this show touches you in a particularly vulnerable place, depending upon your life experiences. In which case, weep at will.
Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.
‘The Notebook’
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Nov. 25 and 26, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 28 and 29, 1:30 and 7 p.m. Nov. 30
Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
Tickets: $144-$45, available at 651-224-4222 or ordway.org
Capsule: While potentially touching, it’s at root about the long-term love between two not terribly interesting people.
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