‘The Notebook’ on Broadway will officially close in December
It was a relatively short run for The Notebook on Broadway, the theater adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ incredibly successful eponymous novel and 2004 film: the show has just announced that it will officially play its last at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on December 15.
The production—which features a score by Ingrid Michaelson—first opened in March: once things wrap up, the cast will have played a total of 35 previews and 317 performances.
Although the arrival of The Notebook in the Theater District was met with a ton of excitement and anticipation, the show famously failed to snag a nomination for this year’s Best Musical Tony Award, clearly a driver of potential ticket sales. Bekah Brunstetter’s book and the two leading actors earned recognition but none of them won in their respective categories.
“In Brunstetter’s adaptation of the book, this threadbare tale is further reduced to its archetypal essentials,” wrote Time Out’s theater critic Adam Feldman in his review of the show. “Boy meets girl, and they fall in true love straightaway, without even the sparks of bickering Sparks gave them. […] Boy loses girl, but we know he’ll get her back because, unlike the film, the musical makes no effort to hide the fact that the older man reading to Allie is Noah. Potential threats to their happiness (Allie’s fiancé, Noah’s rebound relationship) are minimized or cut, so there’s no suspense—or emotional stakes—in their romance, just a steady march to a conclusion we already know.”
That assessment echoes other similar ones among theater experts, a fact that, perhaps, makes the closure announcement a bit less surprising.
That being said, just like Sparks’ original novel and the movie that originated from it, The Notebook on Broadway has amassed a pretty devoted fanbase that felt particularly attuned to the music on the show. Unfortunately, folks only have a few more months to experience the production live again.