The Notebook at the Schoenfeld Theatre

It is worth acknowledging from the jump what many of you, my dear and indulging friends, suspect: my expectations for a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook (a movie I do not particularly like) with music from Ingrid Michaelson (a singer-songwriter whose work I do not particularly enjoy) were not, well, they weren’t particularly high. I was mostly interested in seeing it to celebrate a former collaborator, Jordan Tyson, who’s making her Broadway debut as Younger Allie. 

When my parents announced they were coming to town, I knew just the show to recommend. Everything about the idea of a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook that caused me to approach it with eyebrow arched also makes it ideal My Parents Are Coming to the City material. And it is. The Notebook is indeed perfect fodder for the MPACttC crowd. That’s a backhanded compliment in many cases, but The Notebook also happens to be good.

I was more or less instantly charmed. Given the cast, I should have known. It’s hard to watch Dorian Harewood and not be charmed. Harewood, who plays Older Noah, and Maryann Plunkett (Older Allie) are both great actors, and it is a joy to watch them. The contemporary portions of The Notebook are set in the nursing home where Older Allie receives live-in care for advanced Alzheimer’s. Plunkett is remarkable, and exhausting to watch. I mean that as a compliment. I don’t know how she gives that performance eight times a week. It must be physically exhausting. Her Tony nomination is richly deserved.

I assume you know the story. So does the show, come to think of it. There are no attempts to couch anything in a twist, no reveals that a lesser adaptation might try to milk. We find things out as they happen. Perfect. Older Noah reads to Older Allie, his wife, from a mysterious notebook. We “learn” after a little while that the contents of the notebook are their story. I remember that being a bit more of a reveal in the movie version, but here the staging makes that more or less apparent from the start. Again, that’s fine. The Notebook isn’t interested in hiding that from you. The ultimate revelation about the notebook—if you know, you know—still hits, and it hits like a fucking truck.

The most interesting and inspired choice The Notebook makes is dividing both Allie and Noah into three flavors: Younger, Middle, and Older. Prior to seeing the show, I assumed that was a concession born out of practicality. I thought the show might jump back and forth too frequently to allow for aging or de-aging, whether through makeup or quick changes. Instead, the leads in triplicate are part of the conceptual fabric. Even if the idea started as a matter of practicality, the creative team has turned it into an inspired choice. The three eras don’t interact with one another, by which I mean they do not speak to one another, but they do create echoes. The various ages sing together, and spend much of the show on stage simultaneously.

Directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams make smart, tasteful use of the conceit. They never lean on it. This is a shockingly unsentimental show given what it could have been. One of my favorite moments, which comes during the absolutely tear-drenched finale—I have cried that hard in a theater only twice before—is when the Allies and Noahs kiss. The Olders are towards the back, the Middles in the middle, and the Youngers are right out front. It passed quickly, a moment content to be only an instant (treat the moment present as a present for the moment, indeed) and everyone goes their separate ways in the staging. That idea, that we are all of the versions of ourselves at any one moment, that to love someone is to love who you have been together and who you are and who you will be, it’s beautiful. I’m tearing up now thinking about it. The Notebook didn’t need to be this thoughtful.

I also have nothing but compliments for the book, which is sharp, funny, and expedient (Bekah Brunstetter earned that Tony nomination). The songs are where The Notebook struggles most. Individually, they are enjoyable, but as a score, they smear together. None of them make an impression, even if none of them offend. They are too similar. Joy Woods, who is phenomenal as Middle Allie, singlehandedly turns “My Days” into a great 11 o’clock number, but that was the only time I found myself getting lost in the music. The odd lyric jumps out here and there—Older Allie’s “I am in love with all of the things I forget” is wondrous—but there’s little to grab onto. With a better score, The Notebook might have a chance at entering the pantheon. I’m sure it will do just fine in any case.

One final thought before I go. In The Notebook, we get to see Harewood and Plunkett do something we don’t often get to see great older actors do: be people who are old. That phrasing is intentionally belabored. They aren’t playing Old People. Older Allie and Older Noah aren’t sagacious grandparents. Nor are they there to reflect on the younger characters around them. Though it would have assuredly wrecked me, The Notebook features nothing like Light in the Piazza’s “Let’s Walk,” a song about the passage of time framed around the behavior of The Kids These Days, and that’s as it should be. Allie and Noah are the narrative, in all three eras we see depicted. The Notebook gives equal time and weight and dignity to their experiences near the end of their lives as it does to those nearer the beginning. Older Noah’s flirtation with Older Allie is given the same energy as Younger with Younger. That is a kindness we do not normally see afforded in popular entertainment. I looked over at one point to notice my parents quietly holding hands. Who knows what memories they were sharing in that moment.

Merrily We Roll Along at the Hudson Theatre

I wonder how much time and energy has been put into deconstructing Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim’s infamous problem child. I wouldn’t be surprised if more ink has been spilt over Merrily than any other show in his canon, and I wonder, I do I do, if any show with so short an original run has received as many revivals. The strangest part of all this is that the general consensus remains the same, forty years later: Merrily We Roll Along does not work.

People love a project, though, and that may account for the show’s enduring popularity among theatre types. It’s also about theatre types, which can’t be discounted. Whatever the reason may be, every five or ten years someone has a high-profile production that “fixes” this unfixable show. The current production, under Maria Friedman’s direction, purports to do exactly that, and the general audience response seems to find it successful.

Imagine if I did? How boring would this be to read?

Merrily is an uncomfortable creation, a musical told in reverse. It tracks the dynamics between three friends—Franklin Shephard, composer; Charley Kingas, playwright; and Mary Flynn, journalist and critic—over the course of 25 years, from about 1980 to 1955. The show opens at a party hosted by Frank, who has recently transitioned from successful theatre composer to successful Hollywood producer. As the show unspools, or spools, or respools, or however you want to put it, events from the past make sense of what we’ve already seen in the future.

It’s a clever idea, one that feels like it should work. That may be another reason why Merrily keeps finding new gasps of life: it is easy to convince yourself that it’s only a few small tweaks away from humming along. Given the creative team involved—Hal Prince as original director, George Furth writing the book, and Sondheim on keys—that’s understandable. Nevertheless, every production leads people back to the same conclusion: everyone is so unlikable when the show starts, it’s impossible to care about them by the end.

I don’t know if that’s the problem. It might be a problem, sure, but I don’t think it’s the problem. There are plenty of unlikeable characters littering the aisles of American theatre, and we don’t bandy that criticism around. I think the issue is more complicated than that. I think Merrily, for all the work the writers put into it, feels kind of lazy.

That is, prima face, an absurd statement. If there are negative words to be associated with Stephen Sondheim, “lazy” ain’t one of ‘em. To clarify, I don’t think the show is lazy. I said it feels lazy, which is not the same thing. Because of its structure, Merrily has no choice but to take shortcuts to try and elicit emotional responses it hasn’t earned. That’s what happens when you show the post before the hoc. Structured as it is, the show is asking for the audience to experience the payoff without first having invested.

The entire score is built around reversing song and reprise. Embittered or warped renditions of songs transform back into their original purity, mirroring the journey of the characters. Look at “Not a Day Goes By,” which, chronologically, is first sung at Frank’s wedding. The song appears again when Beth and Frank get divorced, a fairly traditional use of song and reprise. The song they sang to one another at their wedding is now a lament of the fact that she’ll never stop loving him. 

The problem? We don’t know Beth yet. Her solo performance of “Not a Day Goes By” is the first time we see the character. That’s a heavy song that requires a lot of audience investment to work, but we don’t get that. Instead, it feels maudlin.

Beth is my favorite character in the show. If the whole thing were presented chronologically, I would probably find her performance of “Not a Day Goes By” devastating. As it is, the best I can give you as an audience member is “I trust that the song currently being sung is motivated by something I will understand later,” which puts me at a remove. Musical theatre is all about feeling. That is its primary motivation as an art form. You cannot separate an audience from what’s on stage emotionally like that and expect it to work in the same way.

Another curious side effect of putting things in reverse order, one I wouldn’t have expected: as the final scene pulls everything together, it feels pat. The show ends with Charley and Frank on the rooftop of their new New York apartment building, watching Sputnik fly overhead. During that scene, a few of the show’s biggest dots are connected. We see Charley and Frank become collaborators, and we watch them meet Mary. We also, finally, see the moment Mary falls in love with Frank.

All of these dots that get connected feel cheap, though. The most tragic moment in the show, discovering that a piece of advice Frank cynically gives a young writer in the first scene was taken from a compliment Charley paid Frank in the moment they decided to become collaborators, elicited a laugh from the audience. Somehow, presenting the whole thing backwards turned everything that’s meaningful into a punchline.

The backwards structure makes the show a puzzle, like the similarly-designed Memento. Instead of living in each moment, we are constantly wondering about what happened next [sic.]. Memento is a thriller. Trying to solve the puzzle is part of the fun. Merrily We Roll Along is a tragedy about three friends, success, and ego. These are not the same. I continually found myself thinking about that joke from the pilot of Mad Men, when Don Draper says “It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.” Mad Men never made a joke like that again, and for good reason.

Merrily We Roll Along fails for reasons the writers never could have predicted. The current production is very good, but the material is too clever by half. Musical theatre is inherently, and I say this as someone who loves it deeply, a medium for dumb-dumbs. Even at its most intelligent, at its most daring, musical theatre needs to be immediate, something you can entirely lose yourself in. Merrily doesn’t give the audience the space to do that. We’re too busy balancing ledgers and keeping track of questions.

You know, before I saw Merrily We Roll Along, I assumed Mary was the bookwriter in a three-way collaboration. I do think the show would be much better if she were. It would raise the stakes around her, make the dramatic triangle into a real triangle…Hm. Maybe I really can fix it.

Into the Woods at the St. James Theatre

This piece was originally written in the fall of 2022.

I’ve had the good fortune to see the current Broadway production of Into the Woods twice now, once at Encores! and once at the St. James last night. To say that the reception has been positive would be an understatement. “Euphoric” would probably be an understatement. The ovation the audience gives the fully-assembled cast at the top of the show competes in my memory only with the applause that greeted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s entrance at the top of Hamilton back in 2016.

It’s easy to understand the excitement. Into the Woods is uniquely beloved amongst musicals, thanks in large part to its ubiquity in high schools, and the ready availability of a filmed performance of the original Broadway production. It’s been ten years since the show was seen in New York City, and twenty since it was last on Broadway. The audience was ready.

The cast, too, seems to have been ready. You can feel love for the material undulate off the stage. In both performances, Sara Bareilles in particular gave off a sense of being thrilled just to be doing this. It was readily apparent at Encores! that Heather Headley, Gavin Creel, David Patrick Kelly, Annie Golden and Julia Lester all love the show. It was also readily apparent, as it always is, that Neil Patrick Harris loves an audience.

At both Encores! and the St. James, I got the feeling that I wasn’t watching a production of Into the Woods so much as I was watching a production of a production of Into the Woods. The energy suggested the March sisters performing Jo’s plays in the attic. That kind of joy in the material is infectious, and I wish we saw more of it in professional theatre. With this material, though, that approach is a double-edged sword. Everyone is having too good a time to be thoughtful. The audience and the performers were so obviously in love with the material already that none of them seemed terribly concerned with doing the work to embody what makes it great.

With a show like Fiddler on the Roof, say, that wouldn’t be a problem. Get me a cast and an audience that loves the material in Fiddler and I’m going to have a great night. Into the Woods is different. It is a messier, trickier creature. Its themes are subtler, and the fluctuations in its moods will get away from you if you don’t work very hard to pin them down.

Not only does this production fail to offer any substantive work as far as the themes are concerned, worse than that, this is Into the Woods as vaudeville. This is a first-class production of Into the Woods directed as though it were the school version that omits the second act. It’s all comedy, no contemplation. Not that Into the Woods isn’t written to be funny; the show is filled with space for comedy, with lines that can be milked for laughs as much or as little as the actors want. Director Lear deBessonet appears to have told everyone to milk the show dry as Milky White.

This makes the first act a breeze, but the second crumbles into dust. Into the Woods is based on classic fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. The first act, which more or less depicts these fairytales unchanged, is followed by a second act that interrogates the assumptions at the heart of those stories. What if you escape the tower and your mother, but the world really is dangerous and unpredictable? What if life with Prince Charming isn’t all you expected? Was Jack right to take from the giant?

Without deep and sincere character work in the first act, which is the egg that holds this bake together, the audience has nothing to hold onto when the tempo and mood suddenly shift. The darker and more thoughtful turn taken by the second act is so ill-served by the choices here that I found myself wondering during the Encores! performance if “No One Is Alone” makes any sense as a song. It was unmoored from any dramaturgical sense of place.

Though most of the major issues persist, the Broadway production is a marked improvement. The production itself hasn’t changed at all, but the cast has. Phillipa Soo was magnificent as Cinderella. She brought a subtlety to “On the Steps of the Palace” that most of the first act lacked. Brian d’Arcy James, as dependable a leading man as you can get, made sure that the Baker is a coherent individual rather than a series of laugh lines. When their rendition of “No One Is Alone” started, from the moment Soo’s phrasing choices crystalized on “Mother cannot guide you,” it was a revelation.

D’Arcy James and Soo are such experienced, thoughtful actors that they are able to push against the limitations of what the production is asking. They can feel in their bones what the show is meant to be, and they instinctually steer it in that direction. My greatest disappointment in all of this may be that the two of them were not in the production their performances deserve. That would be worth all this euphoria and then some.

I find myself thinking again and again about what the reviews and audience response would be like if this had been the first-ever production of Into the Woods. Rest assured that the reviews would be nowhere near as kind. They’d fall more in line with the gentleman I overheard leaving the St. James, who said “I loved the first act but the second act was kinda…” If this were the show’s debut, it would have almost immediately vanished into obscurity. What I saw a month ago at Encores! and last night at the St. James was a good musical comedy with a messy second act. Lord knows we have enough of those. Into the Woods is, as both the cast and the audience know, so much more than that.