“Roots” Actor Dorian Harewood on His 'Color Conscious' Role in Broadway's “The Notebook: The Musical ”(Exclusive)

“The timelessness of the relationship specific to this show is something that I have with my wife,” says the TV, film and stage vet

Jeanette D. Moses/Shutterstock Dorian Harewood at a photo call for Broadway’s ‘The Notebook’ on Jan. 24, 2024.

When Dorian Harewood walks onstage in Broadway’s The Notebook: The Musical, he carries a lifetime of creative triumphs.

He portrayed Simon Haley in the 1979 TV miniseries Roots: The Next Generations and recreated Olympian feats in the 1984 TV movie The Jesse Owens Story. He also carries memories of acting alongside Bette Davis, singing “Suite from Porgy and Bess” with opera legend Kathleen Battle and sharing a hot tub with Whoopi Goldberg in the 1989 film Kiss Shot.

Harewood’s return to Broadway, 46 years after starring with Morgan Freeman in The Mighty Gents (1978), crowns a career defined by versatility, whether working with Oscar-winning director Stanley Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket (1987), receiving an Emmy nomination for narrating Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream (1995), performing with Chita Rivera in Kiss of the Spider Woman on Broadway (1996) or winning an NAACP Image Award for the television series I’ll Fly Away. In every endeavor, he’s a magnetic force.

“As an actor, I see myself as an instrument and the words are the music,” Harewood, 73, tells PEOPLE. A classically trained vocalist, he’s applied that approach in everything from his first professional gig as Judas in a 1971 touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar to his current role as “Older Noah” in The Notebook: The Musical, which opens at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on March 14.

Bobby Bank Dorian Harewood in New York City on Feb. 26, 2024.

Spanning three generations of the story’s central couple, Noah and Allie, The Notebook first earned rave reviews as a best-selling book by Nicholas Sparks, then as a critically acclaimed 2004 film directed by Nick Cassavetes. 20 years after the movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, composer Ingrid Michaelson and writer Bekah Brunstetter have shaped the story into a rousing, emotionally charged musical.

Says Harewood, “Bekah adapted the movie brilliantly — the through line of going back and forth with time, with these two young people, then showing the older couple and the challenges they have dealing with Allie’s dementia.”

“The timelessness of the relationship specific to this show is something that I have with my wife,” adds Harewood, who recently celebrated 45 years of marriage to actress Nancy Harewood. “We still look at each other like we first met. My thoughts are that we’ve been together in other incarnations, so our essences have been solid for a long time. The Notebook kind of talks about how you go through time, through trials and tribulations, but if you’re really meant to be together, then you usually end up together.”

Julieta Cervantes Dorian Harewood in The Notebook.

The Notebook is notable for what co-director Schele Williams calls “color-conscious casting,” with three couples of different cultural backgrounds representing the universality of love.

“This particular project is trying to show that what matters is what’s inside,” says Harewood, whose younger Noah counterparts are played by Ryan Vasqeuz and John Cardoza. “If you peeled the skin off all of us, we’d all look the same. I do think the reason why they’re able to put The Notebook on is that there’s a population out there that can look beyond the exterior and really see what the person has to offer. Slowly, there’s been some advancement towards enlightenment.”

Julieta Cervantes From left: John Cardoza, Dorian Harewood and Ryan Vasquez in The Notebook.

Interestingly, before auditioning to play role James Garner played in the 2004 movie (Harewood, incidentally, costarred with Garner in two movies: 1984’s Tank and and 2000’s The Last Debate), he wasn’t familiar with the source material.

“I had never seen the movie,” he says. “I never read the book. “I looked at the role and after having seen the movie, I thought it was terrific. Then I looked at the script for the audition and the music. The music was wonderful. That’s what really excited me.”

50 years ago, Harewood’s lead role opposite Bette Davis in Miss Moffat, a musical adaptation of the playThe Corn is Green, reflected a similarly bold casting decision. “It was based on Emlyn Williams, who was a Welsh miner’s son,” says Harewood. “They equated the Welsh miner’s son with the African American sharecropper in the south.”

During production, Harewood forged a close friendship with Davis, who became his mentor. “What she liked most about me is that I didn’t know anything about her,” he says. “I hadn’t seen any of her movies. I wasn’t fawning over her. She really loved my singing and what I was doing, acting-wise. She’d asked me if I’d ever thought about acting and I said no, I was a singer. She said, ‘Your dramatic instincts are very similar to mine and you’d be cheating yourself if you didn’t at least explore it.'”

Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Dorian Harewood, Kristoff St. John and Irene Cara in Roots: The Next Generation.

That exploration soon led from Harewood’s feature film debut in Sparkle (1976) to career-defining work as Simon Haley, the father of Roots author Alex Haley in the ABC miniseries Roots: The Next Generations, the sequel to the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries. “I was doing The Mighty Gents,” he recalls. “The producers were about to offer Simon Haley to Ron O’Neal. Then they heard that The Mighty Gents had folded so they said, ‘We’re gonna call Dorian.’ I didn’t even know I was being considered!”

50 years later, Harewood brought a riveting blend of athleticism and dramatic nuance to the two-part television biopic The Jesse Owens Story.

“I was aided by the fact that I ran track in high school, nowhere near as fast as Jesse Owens, but I ran some of the same events — hurdles, some of the dashes, broad jump,” he recalls. “I was able to study Jesse’s upright stance and the way he ran, so we could intercut between the real footage and me doing it.”

Courtesy Everett Collection Dorian Harewood and Debbi Morgan in The Jesse Owens Story.

In a sense, the arc of Harewood’s career mirrors the progress Black actors have made in Hollywood. “It’s certainly gotten better and a lot of it is due to projects like Roots where there weren’t stereotypical characters,” he says. “The most important thing was that it showed African Americans as human beings. It was more relatable to wider audiences.”

It’s a year of big anniversaries for Harewood (45 years since his wedding, 50 years since working with Bette Davis, 45 years since Roots: The Next Generation, 40 years since The Jesse Owens Story), and as Harewood reflects on his career, he’s got a lot left to do but nothing to prove. In fact, until his manager, Lesley Brander, convinced him to audition for The Notebook, he had been doing mostly voiceover work in recent years and wasn’t interested in auditioning for anything.

Recalls Harewood: “She kept saying, ‘People don’t know that you’re still around.’ I said, ‘I know I’m still around. That’s what counts.'”

Read the original article on People.