A show about memory that chooses to dramatize memory structurally is either very smart or very risky. The Notebook, in its touring production that just closed at Smith Center, is mostly the former — though the risk never entirely disappears. The decision to cast three separate actor pairs as Allie and Noah across their lifetimes, running the timelines simultaneously rather than in sequence, is one of the more formally interesting choices to come through this city in recent memory. It asks the audience to do real cognitive work, and it respects them enough to believe they can.
The three pairings don't have equal weight, and that turns out to be correct. Chloë Cheers and Kyle Mangold as the young Allie and Noah are bright and impatient in the way first love requires. Alysha Deslorieux and Ken Wulf Clark as the middle-aged versions are doing more complicated work — they're playing the cost of the choices the younger versions haven't made yet. Sharon Catherine Brown and Beau Gravitte as the older couple anchor everything, and Brown in particular is remarkable: she finds specificity where the writing offers her generality, and her precision elevates every scene she shares with the other timelines.
Ingrid Michaelson's score deserves more credit than it typically gets. These are not theatre songs pretending to be pop; they're written for the specific emotional granularity this kind of story requires, and they earn their moments of release. The production at Smith Center benefited from a sound design that trusted the room rather than fighting it.
What the structure exposes is the fundamental problem with the source material: Allie and Noah's love is asserted rather than argued. We're shown it from every angle and across every era, but the show never quite answers the question a more demanding piece would ask — why these two people specifically? The structure multiplies the love story without deepening it. That's a limitation the production can work around but not solve.
On the God Mic's 7-point scale: 4 out of 7. A production that earns its ambitions without fully transcending the material that constrains them. Worth seeing for the structural intelligence and for Brown, whose work here is the kind of thing you remember.