‘The Notebook’ Touring Musical Returns to Chicago With a Softer, Less Haunting Take on Memory, Love and Loss
CHICAGO, IL — The touring production of “The Notebook” has come back to Chicago, where the musical first premiered at Chicago Shakespeare in 2022, and the return invites an unavoidable comparison. What once felt like a spare, reflective meditation on memory now lands as something broader and less distinctive.
Adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ novel and the 2004 film, the show still centers on Noah reading from the notebook to Allie as she lives with Alzheimer’s. But in this version, the emotional edges are smoother, the structure more familiar, and the result less striking than the original production’s quiet boldness.
How the musical frames Noah and Allie’s story
Bekah Brunstetter’s book leans into a memory-scape built around three versions of the couple: teenagers, young adults and the older pair in a nursing home. Michael Greif and Schele Williams’ direction keeps those eras moving fluidly, with characters often overlapping across time and even sharing songs.
In the score by Ingrid Michaelson, the songs tend to focus on private, intimate moments rather than sweeping declarations. That approach gave the show a wistful, almost detached quality in 2022, when its fragmented structure and emotional restraint matched the moment in a way that felt unusually resonant.
The original staging also used cross-racial casting for the different versions of Noah and Allie, which reinforced the story’s sense of distance and timelessness. On tour, the casting is more literal, and the production has also changed its ending, making it feel more hopeful but less potent.
What changed since the premiere and Broadway run
The musical’s path since its Chicago premiere has clearly shaped how it plays now. After the 2022 debut, the show reached Broadway in 2024, where its emotional restraint was paired with some surprisingly commercial flourishes, including commemorative tissue boxes sold to theatergoers. The Broadway run lasted about nine months and was considered a disappointment at the box office.
That history seems to have nudged the touring version toward a more conventional crowd-pleaser. Even the musical climaxes now feel more openly engineered for tears, with songs and lighting cues pushing harder toward payoff than before.
The change is not just structural but tonal. Michaelson’s voice used to come through as conversational and sweetly melancholy; here, that distinct personality is harder to hear. The result is a production that feels more polished, but also less singular.
A cast that keeps the emotional core alive
Even with those shifts, the touring cast gives the story enough heart to land. Beau Gravitte, as older Noah, carries the production’s emotional burden with a believable mix of devotion and exhaustion. His performance gives the character a weathered hope that Allie might still recognize him.
Alysha Deslorieux, playing middle-aged Allie, provides a strong center for the romance, especially as the story tracks the costs of defying family, risking security and choosing a love that is both painful and exhilarating. Kyle Mangold, Makena Jackson and Ken Wulf Clark help fill out the younger versions of the couple, keeping the time shifts legible.
For all the changes, the musical still circles the same question: what does memory preserve, and what does it lose? That tension remains the show’s deepest appeal, even if this return engagement feels less haunting than the premiere that first made it memorable.
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