TEXT OF REVIEW

Towards the end of the twentieth century, as the corporate world eyed the record-breaking receipts of shows like Cats and Les Miz, it became clear that if you could turn any IP, intellectual property, into a musical, a new stream of profits would come a-calling.

Its also true that producers have always been searching for properties that might sing, and often it’s a labor of love.

So is “The Notebook: The Musical”, now in a national tour at the Orpheum theatre through March 1st  a labor of love, or just another brand name for Broadway’s corporate class to exploit for profit?

Based on the weepy best-seller by Nicholas Sparks and the 2004 film with Ryan Gosling and Gena Rowlands, among others, The Notebook on Broadway presented theatregoers with a free box of tissues at each performance. The show received mixed reviews and closed after nine months, in December, 2024, before embarking on this tour, hoping to make back its investment.

Noah Calhoun, an older man, is in a nursing home visiting his wife, Allie, whose memory has been ripped out of her by Alzneimers. The only way to get her to remember is by reading his notebook diary of their life together. She had promised him, at the time of her diagnosis, that if he does that, she’ll come back to him.

So we embark on their love story, as two couples play Noah and Allie at seventeen and again at twenty seven, while old Noah reads to old Allie.

But back to the weepie business. Much of  the show is saccharine and manipulative, particularly in the flashbacks focusing on parental meddling and class distinctions. And if Allie only focused on the songs, she’d never get her memory back.

But there is much more going on here, and inside The Notebook: The Musical is a much better show than the producers were able to promote. It’s a show about loss, loss of memory, loss of mobility, loss of health.

In that sense, the creators have focused on musical theatre as metaphor, with body movement and dance and snippets of dialogue and song representing the swirl going on in Allie’s mind as she attempts to find meaning inside the chaos.

Along that path, the strongest elements are the performances of Beau Gravitte and Sharon Catherine Brown, who shine in their scenes, and take the show into places other musicals haven’t attempted, and why ultimately, The Notebook works far better than it should.

The Notebook: The Musical plays at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre through March 1st. For more information you can go to broadwaysf.com, which takes you to an agttickets site. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area Theatre for KPFA.

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