Sparks fly in 'The Notebook'

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on May 20, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “Subscriber Preferences” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

Nicholas Sparks’ novels and the film adaptations walk a delicate line between sentiment and sentimentality, drama and melodrama. When they’re credible and emotionally honest, they can induce tears of sorrow or joy. When they’re unbelievable and manipulative, they inspire eye-rolls of disbelief.

So it is with the national tour of “The Notebook: The Musical,” which came to Belk Theater Tuesday in Blumenthal Arts’ PNC Broadway Lights series. The show has its roots in his debut novel from 1996, which became a sleeper hit when it was filmed in 2004. The musical more closely follows the arc of the book than the movie, keeping Sparks’ ending and junking the fairy-tale finale from the film.

Bekah Brunstetter, whose book for the musical earned a Tony nomination, works from an excellent idea: We see Noah and Allie at three stages in their relationship. All three couples flow on and off the stage, sometimes simultaneously, as we hear about events from four or five decades ago. We’re encouraged to question (as we were not in the film) whether these things really happened the way the author of the notebook set them down.

Young Noah and Young Allie (Kyle Mangold and Chloë Cheers) meet one summer and fall instantly in love, despite the disapproval of her wealthy parents. He bolts off to the Army when they accuse him of “kidnapping” the underage girl, and they’re parted for 10 years. Middle Noah and Middle Allie (Ken Wulf Clark and Alysha Deslorieux), each of whom thought the other had lost interest, reunite after he builds the dream house he promised her and now lives in alone.

Meanwhile, Older Noah (Beau Gravitte) and Older Allie (Sharon Catherine Brown) frame the story as an aged but attentive husband and a painter suffering from Alzheimer’s. He reads the diary of the title, which she compiled long ago, to her nightly in hopes of sparking memories in the woman who no longer recognizes him.

Ingrid Michaelson’s folk-inflected music and ruefully observant lyrics work beautifully in Act 1. From Older Noah’s opening sung line — “Time to get up now and let the bones crack into place” — to the final poignant meditation on “Home,” the show takes familiar characters and freshens them. Lighting designer Ben Stanton works in transportive effects, including a backdrop where I swear I saw water shimmering by moonlight.

Yet the core of the story, a devoted spouse’s attempt to connect with the wife whose mind has almost entirely slipped away, never fails. There Brunstetter and Michaelson, abetted by subtle work by Brown and Gravitte, are never corny or unconvincing. Each interaction makes us believe that, in their shoes, we’d behave in the same desperate, loving or frightened ways.

A note to Carolina chauvinists: Sparks lives in New Bern, where this debut novel is placed, and the movie was both shot and set mostly around Charleston. The musical moves it to “a coastal town in the mid-Atlantic,” perhaps to make it feel less specific. That works: The South has no special claim to feelings that have been universal across all locales and all generations.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.