THE NOTEBOOK Opening Night Critics’ Reviews — Page 2

AP is negative:

Theater Review: Without Gosling or geese, Broadway’s ‘The Notebook’ goes for the guts, without guile

https://apnews.com/article/notebook-musical-broadway-review-75ff86fdfa180065618c886e5e0891d3

I don’t think I’ve ever been so far removed from the critics than now. It’s almost like we saw two completely different shows.

DTLI Consensus: Maryann Plunkett does perhaps the finest work of her career in a tearjerker that is otherwise no better than lukewarm.

5 mixed, 2 positive, 2 negative (including the NYT).

https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/the-notebook/

New York Theatre Guide at least likes Woods

https://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/reviews/the-notebook-broadway-review-ingrid-michaelson

"

This compelling conceit gets weakened by a flat book and lyrics. Brunstetter and Michaelson aim for simplicity, but lyrics like a repeated “sadness and joy” fail to illuminate Noah and Allie's depth of character.

The Notebook: The Musical can only compensate so much with Michaelson's strumming music, with repetitions that are pleasant but melt together, and some songs become indistinguishable from each other. Occasionally, a flourish in John Clancy and Carmel Dean's orchestrations grabs the attention.

But throughout the show, it’s Woods who rises to the occasion as she wrestles with the character of Middle Allie and shines. Subtle gestures like a nod of the head feel gigantic. Her body vibrates during her 11 o'clock number, “My Days,” and it feels monumental. Her emotion floods into the crowd and submerges the viewers in her light. Joy Woods: That’s someone we’ll be remembering."

MemorableUserName said: "The Wrap is mostly negative

‘The Notebook’ Broadway Review: Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams Are Sorely Missed

This new musical featuring songs by Ingrid Michaelson is merely lukewarm when it needs to boil over with body heat

https://www.thewrap.com/the-notebook-broadway-review-ingrid-michaelson/

"On stage, Maryann Plunkett delivers an Allie who’s a very confused and troubled senior living out her last days in a nursing home, and her uncompromising performance is supported immeasurably by Dorian Harewood’s sympathetic Noah. When these two veteran actors are on stage together, “The Notebook” is the moving, unabashed, heartfelt tearjerker it’s needs to be.

The four actors playing Allie and Noah’s younger selves are another story. Book writer Bekah Brunstetter — or perhaps it was directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams? — has decided to use two couples to play the roles that McAdams and Gosling handled all alone. On stage, we get the younger Allie and Noah (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza) and the middle Allie and Noah (Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez), with Plunkett and Harewood being the older Allie and Noah.

If that’s not confusing enough, imagine how you’ll feel when the middle Noah first shows up to sing a song about renovating the dream house for the middle Allie. I had no idea who this guy was, and had to wonder if maybe the younger Noah had hired an enterprising realtor to do the house makeover for him.

Playing the two youngish Noahs, Cardoza and Vasquez share the same reserved style of lovemaking. Needless to say, unlike Gosling, neither of them is going to make People’s sexiest man alive cover. But at least they’re operating on the same chaste page.

Regarding the two youngish Allies, it’s difficult to believe Tyson and Woods were ever in the same rehearsal room together. Tyson exhibits a spunky tomboy spirit. Woods appears to be auditioning for the next “Bachelorette.” When the middle Allie and Noah reconnect after a decade apart, their love scene in the renovated house plays like a fantasy suite episode gone completely awry. Neither of them deserves the rose.""

Wow, that line about Ryan Vasquez and John Cardoza not being on People's sexiest man alive cover is...something.

I don't disagree with most of the feedback I'm seeing. The music is eh and nor memorable, Harwood/Plunkett anchor the show (I thought they were marvelous), Joy Woods is a freaking star, and we didn't get any clarity about why Allie goes back to Noah. That whole scene felt like a throwaway moment. I know they wanted to make their own entity, separate from the movie, but part of why the movie works is because that scene, and her coming back to Noah, lands the plane. It's like the 2nd act of the musical was on 2x speed, that they had to get through SO many moments to get to the end that we missed all the parts that tied the full story together and made the love believable.

Updated On: 3/14/24 at 09:41 PM

The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.

Love it, the sobbing people around me sure needed them! I'm glad most of these critics understand they are witnessing a star on the rise though. I knew the second I saw Joy Woods in Little Shop and then Wholesale that she was going to be huge. She's the reason to go to this honestly, but this is a pretty critic proof show it seems.

Holdren in Vulture says Woods has "a beautiful voice," Cardoza is "sweet," and Tyson is "appealingly spunky," but otherwise is almost wholly negative:

https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-reviews-the-notebook-the-effect.html

"Inside this stuffy box, Brunstetter has adjusted the film’s story in ways that—while they might at first glance seem appropriate to a new moment—feel underexamined. Teen Noah and Allie are Boomers now, and no longer meet in the 1940s but in 1967. The war Noah goes off to is Vietnam, and the home where older Noah reads to his ailing wife (Maryann Plunkett, who’s being pushed to overplay the character’s condition in a way that feels cringily like trauma porn) exists somewhere in our contemporary world. Why the change? Here, young Noah is white and young Allie is Black, and Williams told the Times that the show’s team wanted a context in which an interracial relationship “could take place and could be probable.” Great — except that The Notebook tries to play by two entirely different sets of rules. The choice to change the show’s setting and acknowledge Noah and Allie’s love as interracial implies a world where race does in fact exist; but the show also switches the races of older Allie and Noah in the name of, in Williams’s words, “expansiveness” and “inclusiveness.” There’s a weird race blindness at work in this latter choice—and in the fact that the characters’ races, despite apparently being real to the creators, never matter or bear mentioning on stage—that jangles up against the stated intentions of the story’s re-setting (it also no longer takes place in the South but in a generalized “coastal town in the Mid-Atlantic” ). In trying to simultaneously acknowledge and ignore the truth of their actors’ bodies, the show’s creative team has created a pesky dissonance. Perhaps this is why Brunstetter’s book, on the whole, steers clear of specificity. Details are risky; they add both flavor and flaws. Gone is the moment in which young Noah dangles from a Ferris wheel in a mischievous attempt to blackmail Allie into going out with him, or where he convinces her to lie down beside him in the street because she needs to learn to “do what she wants.” No doubt these moments were focus-grouped and deemed a little sexist — how dare he manipulate her by threatening to kill himself! But in stripping Noah of his potentially problematic brazenness, Brunstetter hasn’t replaced it with anything. Now, he’s basically just nice."

Updated On: 3/14/24 at 09:58 PM

Jordan Catalano said: "I don’t think even awful reviews will hurt this show."

I really don't know. Its grosses so far have been solid but will need to sustain at that level or grow.

The landscape seems ripe for a weepy musical that will appeal to female buyers and tourists (think Waitress, Beautiful, to a lesser extent Phantom) but maybe this isn't the one. We've seen stage adaptations of far more famous movies get better reviews and close within 6 months.

Updated On: 3/14/24 at 10:07 PM

Jordan Catalano said: "I don’t think even awful reviews will hurt this show."

I disagree. I think this is a show that could have soared to the front of the Best Musical race with great reviews and that would have probably made it turn into a show people are talking about in a positive way. As is, I don't think the mixed & negative reviews will doom it immediately but I do think they will take a toll. This reminds me of one of my fave flops - Steel Pier - where the Best Musical race was there for the taking, the buzz before opening was good and then the reviews hit and it sort of limped along even with a slew of Tony noms. The bloom was off the rose. I think that's happened here too.

I now regret buying tickets to this instead of The Outsiders for late March. Yikes.

I'm surprised by these reviews, much more negative than I expected. This season is crazy - what's winning best musical?!?!

HenryTDobson said: "I'm surprised by these reviews, much more negative than I expected. This season is crazy - what's winning best musical?!?!"


Back to the Future. Ask the Brits lol

Updated On: 3/14/24 at 11:38 PM