The Notebook

Here's something the marketing for The Notebook doesn't fully prepare you for: it's not a nostalgia play. The 2004 Ryan Gosling film lives in the cultural memory as a certain kind of weep-at-home movie, the kind you've probably seen three times without fully admitting it. The musical — which had its Broadway run in 2024 and is now touring — is something more structurally ambitious, and at Smith Center it largely earns its ambitions.

The key creative decision, and the one you'll be thinking about after: three separate actor pairs play Allie and Noah at different ages, simultaneously. Chloë Cheers and Kyle Mangold are the young couple; Alysha Deslorieux and Ken Wulf Clark carry the middle years; Sharon Catherine Brown and Beau Gravitte are the older Allie and Noah, whose scenes frame the whole. All three timelines run together, sometimes sharing the same physical space. It could be gimmicky. It isn't. Director Schele Williams keeps the emotional logic of each timeline clean enough that you always know where you are, and the effect is genuinely moving — watching the same love at three different temperatures at once.

Ingrid Michaelson's score is the right choice for this. Her songs are built for exactly this kind of interior emotional weather — wistful, unguarded, prone to cracking at the seams. The cast handles the material well. Brown and Gravitte anchor the memory sequences with a tenderness that never tips into sentiment, and Deslorieux brings a restless intelligence to Middle Allie that keeps the character from feeling like a bridge between the younger and older versions.

Not everything lands. The book, by Bekah Brunstetter, occasionally has to do a lot of plot work that slows the emotional current. The scene where the story's framing device becomes explicit is the weakest moment — it over-explains something the production has been trusting the audience to feel. But these are structural problems the show inherits from its source, and the production works around them well enough.

Reynolds Hall was a good house for this show. The intimacy the production needs — and it does need intimacy — was available even from mid-orchestra. If you're on the fence, sit center rather than on the edges; the simultaneous-timeline staging rewards a centered sightline.

The short version: If you have any feeling for the story, this production will earn your tears. If you're skeptical, the structural ingenuity gives you something else to engage with. Either way, it's worth the night.