The Notebook: The Musical’s Nicholas Polonio: “Life is made up of a series of love stories”
Rody Vera (who plays Older Noah) sings the opening lines of the first song, “Time” as the cast rehearses for Theater Group Asia’s (TGA) upcoming production of The Notebook: The Musical. Around him gather the other members of the main cast, including the younger versions of his character and his love interest, Allie: three pairs of actors playing the central couple whose epic journey audiences will be following throughout the show.
The musical is based on the 1996 best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks about a couple whose love endures in spite of a multitude of obstacles including family objections, socio-economic class differences, miscommunication, the horrors of Alzheimer’s disease, and, as the opening song expresses, the passage of time itself. The show ran on Broadway in 2024, with music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson and a Tony Award-winning book by Bekah Brunstetter.
Rehearsals are in full swing for this production, the first one outside of the U.S., and TheaterFansManila.com had the opportunity to watch a preview of the entire first act of the show, featuring many of the scenes that lay the foundation for Noah and Allie’s decades-long romance.
TGA’s production is directed by Nicholas Polonio, a Filipino-American theater director based in New York City with directing credits including The Self Improvement and Male Preservation Society, or S.I.M.P.S. (IRT Theater), Mary Stuart (The Lee Strasberg Institute), The Police (Hangar Theatre Wedge), and POV: U Run Joe Biden’s TikTok (ANTFest). As associate director, he has worked on various acclaimed productions including the Tony Award-winning Slave Play on Broadway, the West End, and its Los Angeles premiere, and most recently, the critically acclaimed production of La Cage Aux Folles starring Billy Porter and Wayne Brady at the New York City Center. He currently serves as Director-in-Residence for Leviathan Lab, “an award-winning nonprofit creative studio whose mission is the advancement of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) performing artists and their work.”
TheaterFansManila.com got to chat with Polonio about putting together this layered love story, making sense of the different timelines, and what audiences can take away from this version of The Notebook.
One couple, mixed timelines
The musical lays out Noah and Allie’s love story in a unique way. Not only are there three sets of actors portraying them at different stages of their lives, but these three couples experience events over different stretches of time. The younger storyline takes place over the course of an entire summer in the 1960s, the middle storyline covers about twelve hours in the 1970s, and the older storyline takes place on a single, pivotal day in 2026.
Polonio shared that what interested him beyond wrangling these multiple timelines was also the specific times at which certain scenes take place: “He [Middle Noah] sings ‘Leave the Light On’ probably, like, sunset, 8 p.m., on a Tuesday. Then, when does she [Middle Allie] have that brunch scene? When she shows up at his house, how long was that after ‘Leave the Light On’? And really, it’s almost like a journal, like documenting out the specifics of the arc of their days.”
Working with the three sets of actors to portray their versions of the same characters was a delicate balancing act but also an interesting exercise. It ultimately proved to be beneficial, according to Polonio, because one couple did not have to carry the entire show by themselves and instead, through their distinct performances, they all helped shape the entire show.
“In rehearsal, it’s been nice that the thing develops as a whole rather than sometimes you do shows where it’s like, I need to get these three actors to do this. And then the whole company needs to be about them being able to do this. And here, everyone has the opportunity to give and to support as much as they have the opportunity to need support and need the story to be about them.”
A portal to their memories
One of the serious themes the musical tackles is how to live with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s disease, and it is a topic that is treated with the requisite sensitivity. Polonio highlights that the family relationships that are built by Older Noah and Allie remain important in the piece and that the debilitating disease has real consequences on other characters and is not just a metaphor.
Polonio shares: “What I really love about Bekah’s [Brunstetter] script is that she kind of takes it from being like, oh, this, like, mystical, magical thing that’s, like a miracle that she [Older Allie] comes back to being, a really beautiful and true portrait of what it is like to have a family member who is going through dementia or Alzheimer’s.”
He described the set design extensively and how it grounds the story in reality while making memories shine through: “The entire downstage portal of it is the memory care facility. So, we see the entire set and all these memories come through it. We wanted the memory care facility to always be like a portal into their memories.”
Another fascinating dynamic between the three sets of couples is their relationship with one another, one that Polonio described as unequal. Older Allie remembers who she was, but the Younger and Middle Allie’s have no idea of what they will be like in the future. This helps further distinguish the portrayals of the different versions of the characters, while showing the audience how much Noah and Allie change over the course of their lives.
A series of love stories
Polonio believes that the emotions depicted on stage will reach the audience. “You have to trust the audience to translate that [performance] into what the meaning of the story is. If you tell them what the meaning is, it’s pre-chewed. And also, it will make the actors eventually, like, sink further and further into it.
But if you give them something that’s just about, making the scene tighter and, you know, and that is, like, in contrast to the way you want the audience to feel, they’ll get it. And they’ll feel surprised when they feel those feelings…
And it’s, like, a little bit more interesting to be, like, how does this become that rather than being, like, let me draw all these lines for you.”
As the discussion with Polonio wrapped up, he reflected on what The Notebook and its multiple timelines were ultimately about.
“It is more than one love story. Like each of them is kind of a love story in and of itself. But therefore, the whole thing when it comes together is about life actually being made up of a series of love stories.
Like not only do they not end when you first find the person. But that a relationship itself is about continuing to find and fight for each other.”
The Notebook: The Musical, featuring music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson and a Tony Award-winning book by Bekah Brunstetter, runs from September 3 to 20 at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Circuit Makati.
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