Ordinary Days is streaming until 22 November 2020.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
A production of this show by Streetlights, People! Productions was shortlisted for Musical Theatre Review’s inaugural Best Musical Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017 and I first saw it then.
The show, with music and lyrics by Adam Gwon, is set in New York City. Starting life at Penn State University, it premiered in London in 2008 and then opened Off-Broadway in 2009. It’s a charming piece and very effectively written for four strong performers and there have been a variety of other productions before this virtual one by Top Note Arts. This company also previously staged the show at the Kings Arms, Manchester in 2014.
This clever online production, by Leah Fogo, is primarily made up of individual self-tapes (or looks like it is), mostly made in small spaces.
Jason (Matt Concannon) is newly arrived in his girlfriend Claire’s apartment and basically films himself singing with phone in hand as he shows us where he is putting his stuff. Claire herself (Laura Coard) and also Deb the grad student (Aimée Horwich) initially have the sort of book-filled backgrounds many people have created for Zoom calls. This sense of private domesticity in this production style creates an effective intimacy with its audience.
Claire is struggling to organise her stuff to accommodate Jason and at the same time Warren (Oliver Jacobson) is out on the streets of New York distributing artist’s flyers and picking up the odd lost things he finds that tell ‘a life story’ and Deb is writing to her professor to explain that she seems to have misplaced her hand-written research notes…
The show’s band of MD Scott Stait plus cellist Rachel Shakespeare and clarinettist Tom Evans occasionally appear on screen on separate cameras and the sound throughout is tight. It is poignant to see Claire and Jason onscreen together also on separate cameras. The characters are sharing a tiny apartment and a relationship, but the performers are apart. Video editing is by Matt Powell whose work makes a major contribution to the world of this production.
All four characters converge in ‘Saturday at the Met’ (again with separate cameras and clever backgrounds) with some beautiful writing. Claire and Jason are visiting, and Warren has arranged to meet Deb as he has found her book. He thinks it’s a safe neutral space to meet a stranger and she finds it a nightmare. Jason and Claire’s duet from separate rooms in the gallery is poignant and gorgeous, as is Jason’s subsequent song straight to camera, ‘Favourite Places’. Deb’s number ‘Calm’ takes her one a whole journey to New Jersey and back with actual walking until she finally gets back safely to an enclosed space again.
As all the characters contemplate their ways of getting out of the density of the city and their lives the backdrops expand and they have more personal space. Warren and Deb’s unlikely friendship starts to expand, and the camera work and settings do too until all four characters meet in a lovely outdoor moment.
There’s more plot than this but I would love you to see this clever and creative online production of this gem of a show.
Clare Walters
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