The Notebook: Three Allies, Three Noahs, One Good Cry

The Notebook closed its Las Vegas run Sunday at Smith Center, and I've been thinking about it since. Not in the way you think about a great show — more in the way you think about a structural puzzle that happened to make you cry. Both things are true here, and that's actually a compliment.

The show's central formal choice is casting three separate actor pairs as Allie and Noah at different life stages — young, middle-aged, and old — and running all three timelines simultaneously, sometimes in the same physical space. On paper it sounds like a graduate school directing exercise. On stage, directed by Schele Williams, it works. The trick is that the three pairings have distinct emotional registers: Chloë Cheers and Kyle Mangold play young love with a specific kind of reckless optimism that the middle-aged version (Alysha Deslorieux and Ken Wulf Clark) has clearly paid for. Sharon Catherine Brown and Beau Gravitte as the older Allie and Noah anchor everything, and Brown in particular is doing extraordinary work — she makes memory feel physically present.

Why Reynolds Hall Works for This

Reynolds Hall was built for Broadway touring productions and it shows. The room's proportions — 2,050 seats that somehow feel intimate — suit a show that depends on small emotional moments landing across a large space. The sound design on this production is clean and balanced in a way that Las Vegas touring stops sometimes aren't; the band never overwhelms the vocals, and Ingrid Michaelson's score has enough dynamic range that this actually matters.

The show's weakest moments come when the book works too hard to explain the framing device. If you trust the audience with the structural conceit for two hours, trust them at the end too. But these are familiar problems with literary adaptations, and the production works around them better than the Broadway run reportedly did.

The Bottom Line

If you have any relationship to this story — the novel, the film, any version — this production will earn your tears and then some. If you don't, the structural ingenuity is genuinely worth engaging with as a piece of theatrical craft. Either way, it's the kind of show that reminds you why live performance exists.

It closed Sunday. If you missed it: the tour is continuing. Worth the trip to wherever it lands next.