The Notebook: The Musical Makes Us Fall in Love With This Love Story All Over Again

(SPOT.ph) There’s no denying the chokehold Nicholas Sparks and his particular brand of romance had on Gen X and Millennials. Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, if you wanted to believe in love—in all its messy, giddy, heart-fluttering, and ultimately heartbreaking glory—you picked up a Nicholas Sparks novel and read it straight through, even when you knew a devastating ending was waiting for you.

And if the book alone wasn’t enough to put you through the emotional wringer, many of Sparks’ biggest stories eventually made their way to the big screen. From Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember to Dear John and The Last Song, these adaptations brought his signature brand of romance—and the inevitable heartbreak—to an even wider audience. And no story captures this particular Sparks cycle better than The Notebook.

It had all the makings of an unforgettable romance: a meet-cute, seemingly insurmountable adversity, a rekindling, and, in true Sparks fashion, a happily-ever-after that comes with a devastating catch. Pair that with a cast that was the very definition of early-2000s eye candy—Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, no less—and you had all the ingredients for a cult classic. And, well, that’s exactly what The Notebook became.

In 2022, Noah and Allie’s love story found a new incarnation, this time for the stage. The beloved romance added original music by American singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson and a refreshed-for-the-stage book by Bekah Brunstetter. And while there’s undoubtedly a worldwide audience for The Notebook: The Musical, it largely ran in North America—that is, until Theatre Group Asia (TGA) brought it out of the US and into Manila for its first international premiere.

For this production, Theatre Group Asia enlisted Filipino-American director Nicholas Polonio and associate director Jamie Wilson to helm the production.

But perhaps the best creative pairing was the power duo of Miguel Urbino and Cha See for Production Design and Lighting Design, respectively. Together, they created a delicate, dreamlike world that echoes the Southern roots of the original material without leaning too heavily into them. Through soft lighting, moving panels, and translucent screens, Urbino and See transform the Samsung Performing Arts Theater stage into a series of vignettes that feel suspended somewhere between memory and reality.

There’s very little pomp to the design—save for the iconic kiss in the rain, which, by the way, they also completely nailed— and that’s precisely what makes it work. Instead of overwhelming the story, the production elements give the romance a sense of place while leaving enough room for the audience’s own memories and imagination to fill in the gaps. The result is a world that feels oddly familiar—even to someone who has never set foot in the American South—and perhaps even more so to anyone who has ever been hopelessly in love.

Sheena Belarmino and Benedix Ramos bring a youthful, refreshingly relatable energy to the story’s depiction of young love. There’s a natural sweetness to their chemistry that never feels forced, even as their characters fall for each other at a questionable speed. Together, Belarmino and Ramos capture the wide-eyed innocence and exhilarating rush of first love so convincingly that, for a moment, you, regardless of your age, suddenly remember the butterflies, the giddiness, the all-consuming certainty that you never want this feeling to end.

Perhaps that’s what makes their performances among the most enjoyable in the production. They remind you of what it feels like to fall hard and fast—to be consumed by the excitement of discovering someone new and to genuinely believe that the feeling could last forever.

Truly, Ramos is a revelation. His previous theater roles, including his runs in Bar Boys and Yemaya, seem to have prepared him for this turn as a leading man. He has the kind of boyish charm that comes effortlessly, but there’s also a magnetism to his presence that keeps your eyes on him even when the stage is bustling with other actors and activity.

More than that, Ramos captures the essence of the kind of young boy many of us fell for in our youth—the charming, earnest, slightly hopeless romantic whose presence alone was enough to make a crush feel all-consuming. There’s something wonderfully familiar about his Noah, which makes it easy to understand why Young Allie falls for him so quickly.

Ramos also takes on a higher vocal register than I expected, occasionally pushing into territory that made me a little nervous for him. But he rises to the challenge, and at least in the performance we caught, he handled it admirably. It’s another reminder that beneath the boyish charm is a performer more than ready to step into more solo leading-man roles.

Shifting gears into arguably the story’s emotional core, Celeste Legaspi and Rody Vera had the insurmountable task of keeping the show grounded in a believable love story despite the extraordinarily unfortunate circumstances surrounding Older Allie and Older Noah. A romance that has transcended young love and grown into unconditional devotion is a heavy burden to portray without falling into melodramatic tropes, but these two veterans give us a masterclass in how to do it. It took a while to pin down exactly what made their depictions so believable, but eventually it came down to one thing: restraint.

Legaspi couldn’t have done a better job portraying the confusion and rare moments of clarity that can befall someone with Alzheimer's. It could easily have been taken over the top, a caricature of reality, and yet Legaspi gave Older Allie a dignified fall into the disease. Likewise, Vera gave us an Older Noah whose love shows up in quiet devotion while still staying true to his young, cheeky self as portrayed by Ramos. For anyone who grew up with lovey-dovey grandparents, you’d easily recognize your grandfather in Vera here.

While each iteration of Noah and Allie brought its own charm, what I loved most about The Notebook was how seamlessly the three versions of the characters came together. You could trace familiar qualities from Belarmino’s Young Allie in Morisette and Legaspi’s portrayals of her later in life. Ramos and Vera, in particular, made it remarkably easy to believe that we were watching the same Noah at different stages of his life, something you could see in every scene but most obviously in their performance of Iron in the Fridge, where Noah laments his current situation and calls back to his younger self. Perhaps this is partly a testament to the staging itself and its ability to suspend us in time, but it was remarkably easy to believe that we were watching the same people move through different seasons of their lives.

And that, to me, is one of the production’s more impressive feats. Unlike the film, which follows a single set of leads (with Older Noah and Allie only revealed at the end), the stage adaptation casts Noah and Allie in three different pairs of actors. The challenge, then, isn’t simply portraying the characters at different ages, but making those transitions feel like one continuous life, even with the non-linear storytelling.

For the most part, the production succeeds. I wish I could say the same for Laurence Mossman, who played Middle Noah.

To be fair: Mossman certainly looked the part. His aura and presence could give Ryan Gosling’s Noah a run for his money. But of the three portrayals, his interpretation felt the most different from Ramos and Vera’s, making it slightly harder to see the connective tissue between the three versions of Noah. It wasn’t quite a question of ability, but of continuity. Beyond the shared color palette of their costumes, Mossman’s Noah sometimes felt more like a separate interpretation of the character than a natural progression of the same person.

There were also moments when his performance simply lacked emotional weight. Middle Noah is meant to carry years of yearning, anger, betrayal, and the lingering hurt of believing that Allie had simply forgotten him. Allowing more of those emotions to surface might have given his performance greater texture and made his internal struggle resonate more deeply. There were glimpses of that emotional turmoil, but I found myself waiting for the cathartic release—the moment when all that pent-up feeling finally breaks through—that never quite arrived.

At the end of the day, this production’s greatest weapon is its musicality. Ingrid Michaelson’s music and lyrics capture Noah and Allie’s life story perfectly, so casting the perfect singer-actor to give it justice is imperative—and boy did they do that by casting Belarmino and Morissette.

I’d have to hand it to Belarmino: that girl has pipes. If her vocal prowess in this year’s Spring Awakening made her one to watch, her turn as Allie cements her place as one of theater’s strongest young singers. There’s a natural musicality to Belarmino’s voice that makes even her spoken lines seem to flow seamlessly into song. And the way she moves from a rich lower register to soaring high notes without sacrificing power or control is nothing short of impressive.

But vocally, nothing compares to Morissette on that stage. Casting a vocal powerhouse like her for this role was absolute genius.  Morissette can sing circles around almost anyone; that’s a fact we knew long before she set foot on the stage. But once she donned Allie’s blue dress, Asia’s Phoenix is reborn into this double-threat whose command of both voice and character feels worthy of a standing ovation.

In Morissette’s hands, every song becomes more than a showcase of her vocal range. Love, heartbreak, longing, and loss weave through every note, making each song a mirror for every young woman who has loved and lost.

Her rendition of My Days is unlike any other number in the show. It gets the full concert treatment, complete with beautiful, dramatic, twinkling lights and a grand reveal of a live orchestra behind her. But despite the grandiose staging of this number, nothing quite matches Belarmino and Morissette’s shared performance in I Wanna Go Back. Pair their remarkable vocals with Legaspi’s evocative acting, and you get perhaps the most heartbreaking number of the night. It captures, with almost painful clarity, the inexplicable grief of losing yourself—figuratively and, eventually, literally.

And perhaps that’s the magic of turning The Notebook into a musical. The story gains another emotional layer through music, allowing the love and heartbreak to land in a way that makes it heal and hurt twice as much.

Polonio’s staging feels like the work of someone who understood the assignment: not simply to recreate a love story we already know and adore, but to give it a new chapter. The result adds yet another reason Noah and Allie’s story feels so personal. It’s romantic without being overly sentimental, emotional without tipping into melodrama, and intimate enough to make you believe, even for a moment, that their love story could be your own.

All in all, The Notebook: The Musical does exactly what it sets out to do: bring Noah and Allie’s enduring love story to a new generation of audiences while giving it a distinctly theatrical identity of its own.

It’s a thoughtful, beautifully staged reimagining of the Nicholas Sparks classic—one that honors the story we collectively know while finding ways to make it feel new, relevant, and, most importantly, intimate. So intimate, in fact, that by the end, it feels less like we’re watching Allie and Noah’s love story and more like we’re remembering our own.

And while the show is sold out as of writing, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for an extended run. Because if there’s one thing The Notebook has taught us, it’s that some love stories are worth revisiting. And this one? It’s a pretty worthy update to the memories we already have.

Catch The Notebook: The Musical at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Circuit Makati. It runs from September 3-20, 2026, with shows every Thursday and Friday scheduled at 7:30 p.m., and two performances on Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Also read:
Everything You Need to Know About The Notebook: The Musical
Your Ultimate Guide To Theater Shows in the Philippines in 2026