The manufacturing’s organizing conceit, and sole inventive danger, is partially accountable. As within the 2003 film, an elder Allie (Maryann Plunkett) has forgotten her decades-long romance with the dreamy Noah (Dorian Harewood), who recounts their saga from a pocket book. Right here, each youthful and middle-aged variations of Allie (Jordan Tyson and Pleasure Woods) and Noah (John Cardoza and Ryan Vasquez) act out their shared previous.
The acquainted broad-strokes theme — love overcoming the passage of time — is spelled out upfront: “Time, time, time, time; it by no means was mine, mine, mine, mine,” sings a delicate and genial Harewood within the characteristically on-the-nose opening lyrics. (Plunkett is a standout as an viewers surrogate, skeptical till she is lulled right into a misty stupor.) All six iterations of the lovers are onstage, although it might take the viewers a second to catch on.
The administrators Michael Greif and Schele Williams have assembled a proficient array of performers to embody Allie and Noah. The truth that they’re of varied racial backgrounds permits audiences a welcome alternative to stretch their imaginations. However the scrupulously colorblind casting additionally hamstrings the present from making many different narrative decisions, to the detriment of its personal logic and enchantment.
Race may need been a dynamic instrument to complement an in any other case vanilla plot. Teenage Allie and Noah meet-cute on the heels of the civil rights motion, when even within the coastal Mid-Atlantic, their interracial sparks might have partly helped clarify why Allie’s mom (Andréa Burns) disapproves. (The shift in setting from the novel’s Nineteen Forties North Carolina at the very least saves us from a loss-of-White-innocence scene on the ground of a crumbling plantation home.)
As a substitute, Brunstetter’s e book, which spreads skinny because it flits backwards and forwards via a half-century, resists delineating the central pair with a lot of any figuring out element. Allie nonetheless likes to color and Noah is sweet with lumber, however an effort to maximise their relatability winds up sacrificing their flesh and blood. The roles will be performed by totally different actors as a result of there’s nothing very specific about both character. The result’s anodyne — and lacks the erotic cost of an attraction with distinct taste set towards a recognizable world.
Michaelson’s pop rating sticks to expressions of emotion — “Unhappiness and Pleasure,” “I Wanna Go Again,” “We Must Strive” — that would slot into almost any boy-meets-girl story, with acoustic guitar, swelling violins and plinking harp all standing in for heartstrings. The songs draw little inspiration from the varied musical eras traversed by the story, as an alternative sustaining a nice and palatable modern gloss.
The identical is true of the bodily manufacturing, which glistens within the reflection of a downstage water’s edge, under a cover of A-frames and vertical fluorescent bulbs glowing like stationary falling stars (the set is by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis, the lighting by Ben Stanton). Greif and Williams’s staging traverses locales and generations with good-looking effectivity, aided partly by Paloma Younger’s costumes, whose interval finishes are refined to a fault.
The affair at its coronary heart, doggedly standard although it’s, might be sufficient to gas waterworks for some followers of “The Pocket book,” whose nostalgia for the property will fill within the onstage blanks. However the musical’s remedy of mortality, although one other straightforward lever to drag, feels extra organically resonant. It doesn’t matter what form of love passes between them, loss of life will certainly half everybody. That’s a fact many individuals would pay to cry about at midnight.
The Pocket book, ongoing on the Schoenfeld Theater in New York. 2 hours, 20 minutes. notebookmusical.com.
