Review: The Notebook at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

If necessity is the mother, maybe expectation is the grim reaper. Rescued from a slush pile of literary agency manuscripts, Nicholas Sparks’ THE NOTEBOOK became a #1 New York Times bestseller in 1996, the first of more than a dozen, and adapted for the big screen in 2004 – with such established and future marquee stars as James Garner, Gena Rowlands, Rachel McAdams, and Brian Gosling.

When Bekah Brunstetter adapted the novel for the stage in 2022, she was collaborating with composer/lyricist Ingrid Michaelson and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. So when this Chicago manuscript hit my desk that same year, in judging for the Steinberg Awards (given to the best play premiered outside Broadway), I could presume that Brunstetter and Michaelson were thinking that their work was small and intimate.

It had been five years since I’d seen Fun Home at Circle in the Square in New York, and three years since it had toured here in Charlotte with our own Corrigan as Middle Allison at Knight Theater. That musical and that scale seemed to be the template for The Notebook, which sports three Allies and tacks on three Noahs. The script delighted me as I mentally restaged it at Circle in the Square, where Fun Home had smitten me.

My enjoyment of the script was enhanced by my unfamiliarity with Sparks’ novel and Nick Cassavetes’ film. Call it snobbery, but I’d devoutly avoided both of them. So the simplicities of the script were actually charming, though I’ve since learned that the flavorings of the novel, grounding it specifically in the Carolinas, were neutered to “A Coastal American Town.”

By the time The Notebook The Musical opened at Belk Theater earlier this week, all memory of Brunstetter’s book had also vanished, leaving me as I was when it first flashed onto my computer monitor: vaguely averse to what little I knew about the Sparks novel and the Hollywood film. Recognition only peeped in when we reached the scene where Allie sees Noah’s photo in a newspaper, standing proudly in front of the old house he had promised to renovate for her.

At that point, I had the advantage of not knowing how the story would end, though I did care. What do doctors know, right?

But I was still vaguely floating around mentally amid the non-specific David Zinn & Brett J. Benakis – and feeling more and more irritated that the story hadn’t touched down in the Carolinas or any other identifiable location. The triple Noahs and Allies, reminding me of Fun Home, didn’t help either.

Notwithstanding the vertical fluorescent lights shuttling up and down from the fly loft to chandelier height, or the repeated, random scurryings and mimed replays of previous scenes, The Notebook kept looking like a charming little musical trying so, so hard to balloon into Broadway-extravaganza dimensions. In reality, even our Knight Theater isn’t quite as small as the Broadway theater where it was staged. The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare was even smaller.

While the pretensions and non-specifics of The Notebook were deflating, threatening to snuff itself out, directors Michael Greif & Schele Williams worked their chief wonders with their finely selected cast. Beau Gravitte was the essence of avuncular as Older Noah, our narrator, even though his own medical tribulations were inexplicably minimized. Opposite him, Sharon Catherine Brown was a noli me tangere termagant, hard-wired to the brink of explosion – and if Gena Rowlands was half as dislikable, good for her!

As pleasant as Michaelson’s songs were, they never lifted the story. This was especially telling when the moment demanded a soaring, searing climax for Brown, but only yielded her an “I Know” duo with Gravitte.

The youthful energy and chemistry between Chloe Cheers and Kyle Mangold were nearly as powerful and volatile as their ultimate evolutions. You can see what they see in each other and why they might last: Mangold’s persistence and healthy self-image presage the crusty, battle-scarred man whose steadfastness we’ll mildly admire later. More importantly, Cheers’ caprice and spontaneity fill in the blanks to the mystery of why Old Noah still adores Old Allie.

In playing time, Ken Wulf Clark and Alysha Deslorieux draw the short straws among our protagonists as the Middles. Yet in teaming together for Allie and Noah’s epic reunion – and splashing around the stage in the iconic downpour scene that fronts the movie’s PR and DVD cover – they are undeniably gifted with the juiciest bits.

Clark even gets to receive Anne Tolpegin’s lukewarm apology for all the patrician prejudice and underhandedness of Allie’s Mother towards him. Jerome Harmann-Hardeman portrays Allie’s dad with equal hauteur and greater honesty.

Call me back when a local company decides to mount this musical at an appropriate scale. We can match the talent. No slights intended.

Review: We Will Rock You at Booth Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

May 1, 2026, Charlotte, NC – It may be an inborn genetic trait, as eternal as gender: you either love the music of Queen or, if you can, you shun it. Coming from the latter camp to Queen City Concerts’ latest conquest, We Will Rock You at Booth Playhouse, I could boast a near-total ignorance of the mighty metal band. To the distress of true believers, I was able to positively identify nothing in the Queen realm beyond Freddie Mercury, the twin trademarks of stadium rock – “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” – and the twin incarnations of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: as the apex of heavy metal pretension and as a motion picture.

Deciding to review Queen City’s new production was a cruel test of how far this wondrous company, with its breathtaking range, could take me out of my comfort zone. Beginning as a streamed series of Quarantine Concerts during the COVID pandemic in 2020, founder Zachary Tarlton rechristened his enterprise in 2022 when it went live with Tick, Tick…BOOM! – and remained true to its concert format and its exclusive devotion to relatively small and obscure Off-Broadway musicals for little more than a year.

With Kinky Boots and Titanic, they gradually discarded their music stands and playscripts, along with their disdain for lighting, costumes, and choreography. By sticking with their Concerts branding, they likely stunted the growth of their audience and community awareness of what they were really about. “Concerts” became truly obsolete as a description of the company in 2023, when QC Concerts presented Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2, in May and a rather dazzling Sunset Boulevard in November. Like special concert revivals up in New York, the typical non-Angels runs were preciously short, three performances at most, so you still left with that concert feeling of having experienced something unique, live, and never to be replicated.

By 2026, events at Booth Playhouse or the Stage Door at Blumenthal Performing Arts seem to have developed a cult following. At We Will Rock You, only the front-and-center seats were strangely vacant, either bought up by plutocrat subscribers who hate Queen or avoided by people like me who were wary of the sound pressure levels likely to be generated by a seven-piece electric band and a cast of more than twenty.

Notwithstanding the trendiness of the 2018 biopic title set the revert to live concert form, my opening night audience was older than the demographic you might expect. Occasional outbreaks of leather and glitter were to be found, but more prevalent was my own impulse in readying myself for the music of Queen: dressing down and casual. Torn between getting decked out in a T-shirt and a golf shirt, I had opted for the more conservative apparel, yet I found the rest of the audience similarly torn. Nobody was confusing this concert with a Charlotte Symphony event.

So there was a palpable, cult-like fellowship in the packed orchestra seats, even before the slacker musicians sauntered in and Tarlton took his conductor position behind one of the two keyboards. A key part of the test, for me, was going to be how empathetic Tarlton was intending to be in reasonably taming those fearsome high decibel levels. Seeing drummer Michael Charlton behind a plexiglass enclosure was not reassuring.

As it turned out, Tarlton was even kinder to my aging eardrums than I’d hoped. This was like middleweight metal behind reasonably amped vocalists, preeminently Patrick Stepp as Galileo, the far-in-the-future rebel/prophet reincarnation of Freddie Mercury in Ben Elton’s delightfully silly script. Until we reached the dreaded “Champions” and the stultifying title song (or is it rap?), Stepp was inevitably paired with Ally Teeples as Scaramouche, played with Gothic stolidity. Scaramouche, it seemed rather early, was fated to do Galileo and the fandango.

The duo introduced me pleasantly enough to “I Want to Break Free,” “Intuition,” “Headlong,” and “Hammer to Fall.” Yet Galileo and Scaramouche’s internet cloud oppressors, Vanessa Robinson as Killer Queen and Lamar Davis as Khashogi, were another vocal power couple, together on “A Kind of Magic” or apart: Robinson most notably on “Don’t Stop Me Now” and her namesake song, Davis on “Seven Seas of Rhye.” Really, the epic length of We Will Rock You nearly sped by with Kacy Connon’s stage direction (and uncredited choreography?), Kel Wright’s rockin’ lighting design, and Sarah Deutsch’s kaleidoscope of costumes: glad rags, punk, militant glitter, and breakouts of Bowie androgyny and leather. Boots, vests, and pants.

Most people will be amused by Elton’s futureworld, where Globalsoft, presumably a metastasizing Microsoft, has basically uploaded all life and soul to the cloud and banned music worldwide to the robotic humans below. Only a distant colony of Bohemians is a threat to rediscover the lone remaining musical instrument left on the planet and revive whatever rock once was. Like Buddy, Galileo and Scaramouche are almost totally clueless. But in his dreams, Galileo receives emanations from the dead, usually in the form of lame and hackneyed lyrics we all readily recognize.

In addition to not-bad-at-all discoveries like “Seven Seas” and “Under Pressure,” there was a new reason for me to harbor affection for Queen when “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” closed Act 1. Never knew it was theirs. And Darren Spencer, as Buddy, a Buddy Holly soulmate, caught me by surprise with “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” never on my radar before. On the other hand, when Robinson reached “Another One Bites the Dust” and Kasie Patlove as Oz exhumed “No One But You (Only the Good Die Young),” my reasons for despising Queen took on fresh fuel. Overall, QC Concerts’ journey through their songbook was quite worth taking and delightful, thanks  to Elton’s whimsy, Connon’s dynamic theatricality, and Tarlton’s spirited, unerring musicianship.

For those of you who love those Brits, do not hesitate!

Review: Actually at Davidson Community Players

By Perry Tannenbaum

Midway into its sixth decade, Title IX seems to be limping a little, not as top-of-mind as it once was. Among the half million emails still undeleted from my various accounts over the past decade, including those religiously saved from more than a dozen news sources, 145 mentioned the landmark legislation, and just six so far this year.

So when Anna Ziegler’s Actually was first staged in 2017, looking back on a sexual harassment complaint lodged by one Princeton freshman against another in 2015 or 2016, neither of her protagonists, Amber Cohen or Thomas Anthony, could have known much about Title IX that would apply to them. Nor would they have been schooled on implicit consent or what a preponderance of evidence might mean.

Both were born after the legislation went into effect in 1972, outlawing sexual discrimination at federally funded academic institutions, and even after playwright David Mamet probed the consequences and shortcomings of Title IX in his Oleanna twenty years later. That was a combustible two-hander pitting a male professor against his female student. Here, both students are niche admissions at the Ivy League school. We have a young Jewish woman, sufficiently adept at squash to make the University team, filing an action against a Black student who aced his SAT’s and shows considerable prowess at the piano.

This Metrolina premiere, directed by Amy Wada, opened at Armour Street Theatre this past Sunday evening – rather unusual scheduling – just a few hours after The Lifespan of a Fact, Davidson Community Players’ previous production, completed its run. So there was already a rule-breaking ambiance hovering onstage as the lights went up on the two drunken frosh.

Both are blending into Princeton life via alcohol. Pre-date, we later hear, Tom had already knocked down five drinks. By the time we hear this, we’ve learned that reveling at keggers with free beer has been a nightly ritual for Amber, who is also toting a flask of tequila on that fateful first date, both gifted to her by her glamorous mentor, Heather.

Since this is another two-hander, you can rightly presume that Ziegler doesn’t mess with the formality and architecture of Tom’s hearing, adjudicated by three faculty deciding in whose favor the preponderance of evidence – “50% plus a feather” – weighs. Nor do we meet Heather, the rich kid who, in Amber’s telling, comes off like a reprise of the toxic queens of Mean Girls. Or, obviously, Heathers.

Ziegler begins – and ends – with the key moment when Amber may or may not be issuing her implied consent. But she not only dissects the drunken date from first kiss to the condom hitting the floor in Tom’s dorm room (with his roommate in the upper bunk!), she also carefully traces, in confidential monologues, the sexual histories of both players in this disputed escapade.

On Amber’s side (Wada keeps her leads on opposite sides of the stage for most of the action), we learn of a sexual encounter, similarly fueled by drink, after a second Passover seder earlier in the year. We also hear about her insecurities about her body and her tendency to yield to others when she is ambivalent or seeking approval – most crucially when she adopts Heather’s view on whether she was raped.

We get to understand that the attentions of an already notorious campus playboy are more of what Amber truly needs while she’s still unsure, within a more sober self that’s AWOL on a beer-tequila binge, about what she truly wants. At the same time, even more endearing to us, Amber is instinctively aware that something is troubling Tom and wishes to cheer him up.

Tom has been in therapy during his high school days as a result of responding, naturally enough, to the come-ons of his piano teacher sitting beside him on the music room piano bench. Sounds a little trivial compared with Amber’s impulsiveness and insecurity, on view all evening. The guy reveres Mozart and Bartok, for heaven’s sake!

But then Ziegler abruptly swings the scales toward equilibrium. We learn what was troubling Tom before meeting Amber on their date – and his capacities for rage and violence.

Quite worthy of being labelled “foxy,” Luna Mackie isn’t exactly what Ziegler envisioned as Amber, whose self-image as “pretty enough” seems to have stuck since the moment her mom said it. Mackie compensates with her posturing, mostly slouched forward wallflower-style, but occasionally, she goes with oddly arching backwards, as if she’s forgotten to exhale after taking a deep breath.

With admirable ease, Mackie delivers blushing smile after blushing smile, often scrunching her shoulders. It’s only when she straightens up past vertical that we might see those shoulders as belonging to an athlete, one who wields a squash racquet – or if you saw her in She Kills Monsters, a sword. More challenging, Mackie conquers Amber’s neurotic motormouth trait.

But perhaps too decisively. Many are the times when, for me, intelligibility was sacrificed on the altar of speed. Yet living up to Ziegler’s capsule description of her as “charmingly neurotic” is never a prob.

Dionte Darko, on the other hand, tips the unbalanced gulf between Amber’s attractiveness and Tom’s toward equity. He’s also not the quintessence of slickness or arrogance in his demeanor. When he tells us how dearly he loves his mom or how he broke down and cried in the dean’s office, it’s easy to believe every word.

That subtle nonchalance seems to be Wada’s style. For the contrasts in her characters’ looks have been as smoothed out as the differences in their behavior when drunkenly dating or soberly addressing us, or the invisible faculty judging their actions and possible punishment.

Ultimately, this did not seem like laxity on Wada’s part or her actors’. We needed to exercise our imaginations a bit to see this young Don Juan and this charming weirdo in their drunken states as much as we strained to see any big difference in how attractive they were. Once we get past the misalignments of what we see and what we hear, we find ourselves listening more objectively to Tom and Amber’s confessional monologues as testimonies: as evidence we’re weighing and judging.

Yes, saying “actually…” is not the same as saying no. Nor is tacit consent given at 8 pm at a kegger party a contract that is still binding in real life in a dorm bedroom at midnight after a couple has made out all over the Princeton campus.

The more Ziegler piles on complexities, the more we realize that the 37 words that birthed Title IX are ill-equipped to deal with them. That appears more important to the playwright than officially arriving at a verdict up in a New Jersey faculty lounge or library.

Title IX is mostly famed for leveling the playing field in women’s collegiate sports with existing men’s programs, increasing women’s participation tenfold during its first 40 years. At the same time, it stratified procedures for dealing with nuanced interactions between faculty and students, and between male and female students, erecting quasi-judicial architectures and machinery from coast-to-coast, usually manned by people without a jot of legal training.

Guilt could be determined by a feather! As Ziegler points out, the “preponderance of evidence” standard held firm during the time period she addresses – and afterwards until the end of the Obama Administration. It was only in 2017 that the next administration allowed schools to alter their standards to align more closely with civil and criminal courts.

Permission to change, however, wasn’t a mandate.