by Kristen Nevarez Schweizer
March 27, 2026
The highest compliment you can pay Paloma Young’s work in The Notebook: the Musical is that you didn’t think about her at all.
Paloma Young is Tony Award-winning costume designer whose credits span Broadway, the West End, and some of the most beloved productions of the last two decades, including Peter and the Starcatcher, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, and & Juliet.
Yet Young is, by her own cheerful admission, trying to make you forget her work exists in The Notebook: a musical, a Broadway tour heading to San Diego this April 14-19.
“I really love being able to tell simple yet very deep human stories by creating costumes that don’t get in the way.”
It sounds almost self-effacing coming from someone with three Tony nominations and an Olivier nod on her resumé, but spend a few minutes talking with Young, and you realize she means something more precise than modesty. She means that the best costume is the one the character would have chosen themselves.
Clothes That Feel Like Clothes
When The Notebook — the stage musical adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel — made its way to Broadway, Young didn’t want the audience to see the seams. Unlike the maximalist theatricality of Great Comet and & Juliet, where costumes are half the spectacle, The Notebook lives in the emotional register of recognition. Audiences arrive already in love with these characters. More than that, almost everyone in the room has worn their own best pair of jeans or favorite blue dress to a first date, hoping someone special would notice.
“The characters are not extreme and theatrical — they are very real,” Young explained. “Audiences recognize a lot of the emotion and dilemmas these characters have in their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. You wanted the clothes to feel like clothes.“
That is harder than it sounds. Theatrical costume design must read from the back row, must move under stage lighting, must survive eight shows a week on Broadway or dozens of cities on a Broadway tour, and still feel spontaneous.
The Living Design
Young’s relationship with & Juliet — the joyful, anachronism-embracing pop musical that has now traveled from the West End to Broadway to touring productions to cast replacement after cast replacement — has given her a longer view of what costume design actually is. Not a finished object, but a living conversation.
“The thing about costumes that is different from fashion,” she explained, “is that you almost always have more than one costume on stage at any given time, and those costumes are in conversation with each other.” Change one element, and you’ve changed the whole exchange. Alter even a hem length, and you’ve rewritten a relationship dynamic.
I get that, it’s a little like editing a sentence mid-paragraph. The word you removed was holding more weight than you realized until the whole thing goes slack.
Earth and Water
When I ask Young about color, she lit up — which is apt, because color, for her, is never decorative. It’s elemental.
For The Notebook, she arrived at a framework that feels almost mythological in its simplicity: Noah is earth. Allie is water.
“Noah is the carpenter, the earth, the solid, steady grounding element,” she said, echoing lyrics from Ingrid Michaelson’s score. “He smells like wood in the rain.” That physicality shaped everything — the rich, warm browns of his workwear, the way American denim carries a particular kind of unpretentious sex appeal that Young traces (with the specificity of someone who also holds a degree in U.S. History), all the way back to the California Gold Rush and the birth of Levi’s in San Francisco.
The biggest challenge, though, was making brown glow. Fortunately, David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis’ set — which leans toward a bleached, bluish-grey wood — gave the rich browns of Noah’s costumes something to push against, and suddenly earth looked like exactly what it was: something permanent, something you could build a house on…
Allie, by contrast, is painted in blue — a color written directly into the script, tied to watercolors, to memories that fade and shift, to passion that has no fixed form. There was a moment, Young recalled, when the production considered swapping that blue for green. She pushed back, “I think it would be better if we go back to blue.”
California, Denim, and the Art of Fewer Layers
San Diego might want to take credit for Young’s artistic moxie. Young grew up in Poway, studied at Berkeley and UCSD, and built her early credits at La Jolla Playhouse, the Old Globe, and San Diego REP before New York came calling. Nearly twenty years into her Manhattan chapter, she still considers California the lens through which she sees clothing.
“California is casual,” she said, “so you have to tell a story using fewer layers and simpler, softer clothing.” The East Coast, she noted, has its own visual language (high fashion, tailored suits, the polished women of Fifth Avenue), but California taught her something harder to teach: how to make effortless feel intentional. How to make a well-worn pair of jeans carry the weight of a whole character.
Young’s academic path was also diverse; her MFA included a concentration in sound design, an unlikely pairing for a costume designer, which she articulates well.
“Sound touches the body of the actor and the audience,” she said. “It has a resonance. And costumes — we all, as human beings, have worn clothes. We understand what it’s like to feel them on our body.” Both disciplines, she explains, work on the audience below the level of conscious thought. The set can be seen. The costumes can be seen. But they are also felt: in memory, in muscle, in the particular weight of a wool coat or the swish of a full skirt.
This is why she believes the best costumes are often the ones you don’t consciously register. They land in the body, not the brain. And somewhere in the third act, when you’re crying over two people and a house and a love story you swore you weren’t going to cry over, Paloma Young is exactly where she wants to be: invisible, essential, and entirely responsible for how real it all felt.
Paloma Young’s costume design can be seen locally in The Notebook: the musical, the acclaimed Broadway Musical based on the best-selling novel that inspired the iconic film, comes via Broadway San Diego, April 14-19.
THE NOTEBOOK: The Musical
San Diego Civic Theatre
APRIL 14-19, 2026
Music & Lyrics by INGRID MICHAELSON
Book by BEKAH BRUNSTETTER
Choreography by KATIE SPELMAN
Directed by MICHAEL GREIF and SCHELE WILLIAMS
