I Wanna Go Back: "THE NOTEBOOK"

I love a quiet start to a musical. I love the guts it takes, particularly in our confetti-canon-blasting musical theater moment, to begin a musical in silence and invite an audience to gently join it. Oklahoma did this, a long time ago, with Curly wandering onstage singing “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” The Notebook is hazarding everything right now on an even tougher gambit, ringing up its curtain ever so quietly not on a cornfield, but on an extended-care facility.

Critics have not been kind to The Notebook, and I caught up to it with scant expectations. I left, touched by the show’s soft-spoken audacity and confounded by the lack of respect shown The Notebook by Tony Award voters; especially for its score.

I mean, what the heck? This is a new musical with an original score by a fine pop songwriter, Ingred Michaelson, that sings about “love, hope, breath and dreams/As cliche as that seems," while confronting unflinchingly Alzheimer’s disease and death. The opening number, when it arrives, is called “Time,” and captures, whisperingly at first, and soon with aching choral richness, the evanescence of precious moments embraced — then long-remembered... until they are not.

Why does this poignant, lovely new score not merit a Tony nomination? The Best Original Score nominees this year are a mixed lot (they practically always are), and I’m not going to debate their merits  — nominations are always a matter of personal taste. I will, however, point out, empirically, that the Tony-nominated Here Lies Love score, by David Byrne (whose music I’ve enjoyed since CBGB days) and Fatboy Slim, is 14 years old! After playing Off-Broadway at the Public Theater more than a decade ago, Here Lies Love came and went on Broadway this season in a matter of months. It’s a fun score, an offbeat score, but let it rest. The Notebook is new and here, now.

Michaelson, an indie singer-songwriter with a long-playing career, has sculpted a series of Americana Roots-tinged tunes for The Notebook that interlock like an operatic suite, while addressing head-on in her lyrics, life, love and loss, entwined around the desolation of dementia. “I Wanna Go Back,” one of the show’s central themes is a heartbreaker and made me tear up the night I saw The Notebook. I wasn’t alone. Tear-jerker is not an epithet, it is a well-earned emotional fact at The Notebook.

The reverent orchestrations by John Clancy and Carmel Dean, for a virtually all-string orchestra, amplify Michaelson’s songs elegantly and eloquently. This is not a ground-breaking Broadway score, but it is deeply felt and deeply melodic. That’s more than enough to say what it has to say.

Bookwriter Bekah Brunstetter was Tony-nominated for a script that juggles three onstage iterations of The Notebook’s star-crossed lovers simultaneously across one lifetime. In adapting the well-known 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel, as filtered through the perhaps even-better known 2004 movie starring  Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, Ms. Brunstetter updates the World War II time period to the Vietnam War era. I actually found her book the least satisfying aspect of The Notebook, but musical theater librettos are hard, and ambitious musical theater librettos are rare, and doubly hard.

Blessedly, Maryann Plunkett did receive a Best Actress nomination for her herculean performance as “Older Allie,” a woman ineluctably losing her remembered self, but never her spirit. Her counterpart, Dorian Harewood, also got a much-deserved Best Actor nomination as “Older Noah,” a husband clinging to his lost wife through their life story together, scrawled in an old notebook.

The rest of The Notebook cast got stiffed. What about Joy Woods? A singer with simmering stage presence, who delivers a vocally rapturous performance as “Middle Allie.” Or the two tenors who play “Younger” and “Middle Noah,” respectively, John Cardoza and Ryan Vasquez? Of all the twin-faceted characterizations in The Notebook, theirs most closely captures the evolution over time of a single personality. I can’t speak to Jordan Tyson’s “Younger Allie,” because she was out the night I saw The Notebook, but her dewy-voiced understudy, Juliette Ojeda, was terrific.

As for The Notebook’s unfortunate absence as a contender for a Best Musical Tony? Without knocking any of the five nominees (Hell’s Kitchen, Suffs, The Outsiders, Water for Elephants and Illinoise), it belongs right up there with them.