The Notebook!

 I know nothing about The Notebook. Never seen the movie, never read the book. Never seen the musical. All I know about the Notebook is that picture of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in the rain, Sometimes that's a good thing. I went in expecting nothing, What I got was something.

The musical begins in a nursing home. We see old Noah and old Allie living there. He's got a bum knee from an old shrapnel wound from Vietnam, and she has Alzheimers. She has no idea who he is. He is reading to her from a notebook, a story she wrote about their lives in the hope she comes back to him. 

Younger Noah and Allie as teenagers fall in love over a summer. Allie's parents disapprove of Noah, a kid who works for his Dad at a lumber yard. Noah and Allie dream about Noah fixing up an old house aka "our house. The parents take her away but not until after they sleep together at their house.

The time swap is constant. We go from old to young to middle age and sometimes all at once. It keeps pace with songs that really aren't that memorable but move the story along with grace. 

Noah goes to Vietnam along with his best bud Finn. Noah and Allie separate for 10 years until she sees a story in the paper about him building "our house". Now she's engaged to a lawyer that her parents approve of. We get them back together and then we go back to the present where Allie remains not knowing who Noah is until she suddenly does. The ending is both hopeful and tragic at the same time.

The cast is perhaps the best from top to bottom I've seen in years. Everybody can sing their asses off. Everybody can act their ass off. From minor characters like the doomed Finn and his gal Georgie to the nurses to the parents to the family all are knocking it out of the park. 

But the main cast. WOW!. Kyle Mangold as young Noah and Chloe Cheers as young Allie are tremendous at playing innocence and young love. Ken Wulf Clark as middle-aged Noah (if 30 is middle aged) is great at portraying jilted love and Alysha Deslorieux is superb at playing a jilted (or so she thought) woman, She played Eliza in Hamilton on Broadway and gets the showstopper song My Days after which she gets a long and deserved ovation.

Then we get to the glue holding this all together. Beau Gravitte as older Noah keeps this moving and very real. He's a great actor and a good singer. Sharon Catherine Brown plays older Allie. Playing a role like that, where you must convince the audience,you have no idea what's going on. She's fantastic both when playing out of it and the end when she "comes back".

I thought that the story was captivating and since I knew nothing about it, it was such a pleasant surprise. Highly Recommended.

The other great surprise was the sound at the Orpheum. The orchestra is minimal thus virtually every lyric and line was decipherable. The orchestra never overwhelmed the voices like it did in the Wiz. 

Bravo all the way around.