Photograph by Shervin Lainez
The film adaptation of The Notebook, a 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, found a devoted audience in 2004, especially with young women enamored with the tale of lifelong love that overcomes many obstacles. One of those fans was Ingrid Michaelson, then a 24-year-old New York songwriter who was singing to small audiences consisting mostly of family and friends.
Almost two decades later, she was hired to write music and lyrics for the play version that was staged more than 300 times in New York in 2024. Broadway in Cincinnati brings the touring company to the Aronoff Center for the Arts October 14-26. In addition, Michaelson performs live with the Cincinnati Pops October 21 at Music Hall for an evening of pop and orchestral music.
“I watched the movie with one of my best friends,” says the Grammy- and Emmy-nominated artist who found pop success before writing her first musical for the stage. “We were in our early 20s, and we just cried and cried and cried. We wanted love like that.”
Michaelson says she chased relationships in the following years, bouncing from one to the next. “I never had one-night stands, it was always, I’m going to marry him,” she says in a telephone interview. “I was such a lover of love but very naïve and young. Now, years later, I’ve lost my mother and my father, I’ve been divorced. Luckily my ex is a wonderful man, but it’s still traumatic. I’ve been with my new partner (actor Will Chase) for 10 years, which is crazy. But I still look back at that young woman weeping on the couch.”
Since getting off the couch, Michaelson has recorded nine studio albums, including this year’s For the Dreamers, and had two platinum singles, “The Way I Am” (2007) and “Girls Chase Boys” (2014). She toured for years, but ultimately the grind trumped the romance of the road.
“I intentionally picked really wonderful people to be in my band and my crew over the years,” she says. “You’re just rattling around the country with some of your closest friends, going to a Cheesecake Factory on your day off. You create memories when you’re shoved in a 12-person van with 10 people. There’s a high from performing that you don’t get anywhere else. It’s adoration. You’re singing about your problems, then you see the faces of people and think, Oh, they have these problems, too. It’s the great connector, very magical.”
Over the years, though, Michaelson realized she wasn’t really cut out for touring and instead perferred being a homebody. “I like my bed, I like my things,” she says. “And when I’m thrust out of that lifestyle, I don’t know what day of the week it is. I don’t know what city I’m in. I lose my grounding. Also, those bunk beds are hard on your back, especially as you get older.”
When Michaelson began spending more time at home with Chase, it gave her the opportunity to rekindle her childhood ambition around theater. She was in an acting troupe as a youngster and taught that same group while she was in college, where she studied musical theater. “Theater has always been my first love, but I was better at writing music and performing those songs than I was at singing somebody else’s creation on stage,” she says. “I never had the ‘Broadway voice.’ ”
Chase performed in Something Rotten! on Broadway in 2016 and Michaelson hung out often backstage, where she got to see the theater world’s grit and grime up close—and it brought back a wave of nostalgia for her childhood experiences. “I told Will I thought maybe I could write a musical, I have thoughts and ideas,” she says. “So he introduced me to Kevin McCollum, the Broadway producer (Something Rotten!, Rent, In the Heights, Six). He told me he might be doing a stage version of The Notebook, which made me so excited because I remembered loving that love story so much, so deeply.”
McCollum did in fact decide to produce The Notebook, at which point Michaelson’s life began to resemble a Venn diagram. She had put in the preparation, and now she had the opportunity. She did what she’s done best since she was young—she wrote songs. There are more than 20 in the original production.
“I’m friends with (singer-songwriter) Sara Bareilles, who wrote Waitress for Broadway (a musical also based on a movie), and I told her it felt so daunting,” says Michaelson. “And she said it is daunting but you’re surrounded by people who are there to help you succeed. Watching other people perform my music is such a wonderfully collaborative process as opposed to the solitary experience of writing your own songs and performing them yourself.”
Michaelson says she’s extremely happy with how The Notebook musical turned out, and she’s intersted in doing another stage play if the right opportunity comes along. “I’ve done more than I thought I would ever do,” she says. “I reached so many dreams, but I have many more dreams to go.”
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