The road back to Broadway has been an eventful one for John Cardoza. After making his Broadway debut in the ensemble of Jagged Little Pill in 2019, he briefly returned when the show reopened in 2021. He suddenly found himself out of a job when the musical’s run was cut short that December. “It was a very different environment in the industry when we were coming back [after the Broadway shutdown], so it was very challenging,” he reflects.
When his Chicago run of The Notebook, originally scheduled for early 2022, was postponed for six months, he was able to lead the world premiere of the Karate Kid musical before quickly following it up with The Notebook’s premiere at last. During the musical’s year-and-a-half gap between Chicago and its opening on Broadway earlier this month, Cardoza spent six months leading the Broadway national tour of Moulin Rouge! The Musical as Christian.
Now, having cemented himself as a leading man across the country, the biggest chapter in Cardoza’s storied journey with The Notebook has finally begun, with the new musical celebrating its Broadway premiere March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.
Originally playing a smaller role in early workshops, the actor tells Broadway Direct it felt like his time with the show might have ended during those beginning stages. As The Notebook aimed for its Chicago premiere at the start of 2022, he was still doing Jagged Little Pill on Broadway. “We were getting ready to reopen that and it looked like The Notebook was not going to be in the cards for me,” he says. But a fateful text message from a friend and fellow theater artist Eleri Ward changed all that.
“She’s like, ‘Hey, my friend is producing The Notebook and he just asked if I had any names that came to mind for [Noah]. Can I give him your name?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, please give him my name!’ I immediately called my manager and was like, ‘Get on the phone with whoever you need to get on the phone with, all hands on deck.’” Shortly after leaving his final callback two days later, he received the offer.
In the Broadway adaptation of The Notebook, Cardoza plays Noah Calhoun, made famous by Ryan Gosling in the film. For the stage, however, the roles of Noah and his romantic counterpart, Allie, are each split by three different actors in different stages of life, a growing trend in theater.
Taking on the youngest Noah, Cardoza notes that while there was collaboration in the rehearsal room among the Noahs (Middle Noah is played by Ryan Vasquez and Older Noah by Dorian Harwood), each actor’s individual approach was most important to building the character as a whole. “I don’t think that I am the same person I was 10 years ago. I think you would see some pretty major differences, and so it makes sense that there are changes from person to person. We are, in a sense, different people now than we were then.”
Subtle nods are seen in the staging and costuming, but “there’s enough of a through line that you really feel that the character is living the same timeline, but enough differences that you’re like, Oh, this person has grown and is a different version of themselves.”
The Notebook has garnered a reputation for making audiences feel all the emotions and offering a channel to process grief, which Cardoza feels too in playing his character. Early in the story, it’s established that Noah lost his mother at a young age, a loss that Cardoza himself also recently experienced. Losing a loved one, he explains, is “this thing that kind of becomes a fact of your life, which is a very strange place to be with it.” Exploring how to process a tremendous loss through his character in the short-term and long-term has been cathartic for Cardoza.
“We see Noah several years out of the event of losing his mother, and so we’re seeing him at a point in his life where he’s really had time to let that sink in and understand all of the many ways it can inhabit your body at different times and what different things might trigger the grief to flare up because it comes and goes at very strange times,” says Cardoza. “I’ve found getting to experience that through him has been helpful for me because it feels like a less personal way to experience grief.”
In crafting the character of Noah for the stage, Cardoza had many meaningful conversations with the show’s composer, Ingrid Michaelson, and book writer, Bekah Brunstetter. “One of our first meetings, I was sitting down and I got to listen to Bekah and Ingrid kind of, like, wax poetic over the way that people experience grief, and that was one of the moments where I was like, ‘Oh gosh, yes, I’m supposed to be here in this moment listening to these two just make these beautiful, beautiful things out of all of all the sadness that I’ve been feeling.’”
The youngest of the Noahs is the audience’s first musical introduction to the romance at the center of the piece. Cardoza’s soaring voice sets up the song “Carry You Home,” the beautiful lyrical message revisited throughout the musical. “It’s the first time you see their willingness to fall in love,” Cardoza remarks. “For somebody who has had the struggles with loss that he has, he is so ready when he sees something he wants. He meets somebody that he’s like, ‘You feel kindred to me. I need to keep you around,’” a feeling he shares with Jordan Tyson, the Younger Allie to his Younger Noah.
“I don’t have enough wonderful things to say about Jordan Tyson. When you play these sorts of characters, you are each other’s show. I don’t think I’m on stage a single moment that she is not also on stage with me. She’s so much of what happens for me out there that you just kind of have to establish this trust that, you know, without it, it just doesn’t work. [I’m so lucky] she is such an open person. She’s so ready to receive whatever I have on any given day, and vice versa.”
As he revels in this special moment in his career, Cardoza is reminding himself to stay present, just like Noah. “I oftentimes will miss what’s around me, and I have to be very aware of that to pull myself back to reality and calm my nerves. And Noah is sort of like the antithesis to that energy. It’s been so helpful to me in my personal life to sort of experience by way of him what it would be like to forget about the future in such an immediate way. … Let’s just be here.”
You can catch John Cardoza on Broadway in The Notebook, now playing at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.