The Notebook Made Ingrid Michaelson a Broadway Composer, and She's Ready for 'More and More and More and More and More'

“Broadway composer” may be a new job title for Ingrid Michaelson, but The Notebook is not giving the chart-topping singer-songwriter her Broadway debut. Michaelson reached that milestone seven years ago when she spent a month singing “Sonya Alone,” Dave Malloy’s sultry ode to female friendship, in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 at the Imperial Theatre. Even then, she considered it more a homecoming than a detour, her original plans for a career in theater derailed by an ecosystem of power belting. Fortunately for her, it was a rare opportunity to crack open the Broadway door with a showcase of the same subtlety and quiet introspection that fostered her devoted fan base as a solo artist.

Right around that time, Michaelson started to tease her next stage project—a musical she would compose herself. And if it faithfully carried her creative thumbprint, it promised to be a score with melodies that are simple yet thoughtful, paired with lyrics that are sentimental but highly allergic to cliché: Enter The Notebook. Now on the other side of her debut musical, and already tearing up at the thought, Michaelson invited Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek for The Broadway Show into her home for a retrospective on her transition from solo artist to theatrical collaborator. Or as she calls, it, "my favorite thing that I've done." Watch the extended interview and read excerpts from their piano-side conversation below.

All We Can Do Is Keep...Writing
“When I met with Kevin McCollum, one of the producers, he looked at me and he said, ‘The Notebook.’ That's kind of how this whole story started. And I thought, 'I'm such a romantic, it's so in all of my music, I'm made for this.' So I wrote song after song after song. At one point [McCollum] was like, ‘Well, you're the only one on the list right now.’ And I was like, ‘The list? Why is there a list?’ As far as I know, there never ended up being anybody else on the list because I said, ‘I'm just gonna keep writing songs.’ And I did.”

Love Is Wherever You Are
“We had to take it and make it our own. To use a sort of a micro-example, in the movie, Allie says, ‘If you paint the shutters blue and if you put on a porch, and if you do this, then I'll live with you.’ In our version, our Noah already has this vision of this house he wants. So it gives him a little bit of agency. We really wanted to give both the characters a life without the other person. We need them to really like feel like they have to be with each other, but they're also living beings that have their own thoughts and their own minds and their own plans. And so we liked giving our younger Noah this vision. Then it was like, ‘…and do you wanna join me? Because if you joined me in this life, oh my God, would that be the most magical experience.’”

To Begin Again
“We were deep into previews. We were just doing buttons and finishing motifs and underscoring. And then my directors—Michael Greif and Schele Williams—they came to me and they were like, ‘We think this underscore should actually be a song.’ So I came here during the Super Bowl and I had my volume low to not disturb anybody watching the game. But I did miss the halftime show because of it. I didn't expect to have that gift of being able to write another song for these characters that I just have so fallen in love with. And so that was really exciting for me to be able to sort of peek under the hood again and revisit that part of everything.”

You and I
“I don't like sticking out. Because in my Ingrid Michaelson singer-songwriter career, it's Ingrid Michaelson up in the front. There's something about being a cog in a wonderful machine. I love the collaboration. I love the assignments of being told, ‘Can you write something for this? How about trying to get us from here to here?’ I just love being part of that whole process. It's unlike anything I've ever done before, and it's my favorite thing that I've done. I just wanna do more and more and more and more and more.”

Leave The Light On 
“I think my mom and my dad passing—anybody who's experienced that kind of loss knows the DNA shift. That coupled with just getting older—I just didn't wanna do the same thing anymore. I missed theater and the person in my life [actor Will Chase] was on Broadway and I got to go backstage and it sort of reinvigorated this love that I had for it. There's something that feels like home about theater that I wasn't getting in the singer-songwriter pop world. That sense of community. I'm just one small piece of this large, beautiful machine. It’s theater, and it's magic, and it's wonderful.”