Ordinary Days – Theatre Row’s Clurman Theatre, New York

Whitney Bashor and Marc delaCruz; (below)  Sarah Lynn Marion and Kyle Sherman in Ordinary Days at Theatre Row’s Clurman Theatre, New York. Picture: Carol Rosegg

Ordinary Days continues at Theatre Row’s Clurman Theatre, New York until 17 November 2018.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Ordinary Days, virtually a sung-through musical with music and lyrics by Adam Gwon, has been attracting an international array of productions since it was first spotlighted in an annual New York festival showcasing samplings of newly created shows in 2008. It’s an intimate, sufficiently imaginative work, a hardy representative of a certain breed of Off-Broadway musical, one that eschews camp and miniature razzmatazz in favour of sincerity.

New York’s prestigious Roundabout Theatre Company did a black box production in 2009. With its invitingly economic template of only four actors and a score often performed by just one piano, the show has also turned up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and later in London as well, along with various other venues in Europe.

Now, Off-Broadway’s Keen Company has mounted an affectionate revival, directed by Keen’s artistic director Jonathan Silverstein, that affirms the show’s qualities without quite embellishing them.

The show takes us into the lives of four New Yorkers, making their way with a smidgen of whimsy here, a bit of pain there. Warren is a cat-sitter for a jailed graffiti artist, and he spends his days attempting to hand out to uninterested passersby bits of coloured paper on which Warren has written many of his artist boss’ slogans. And some of his own, like: “Never let tall buildings block the view of your dreams.”

When Warren finds a notebook that belongs to Deb, a graduate student at New York University working on a paper about Virginia Woolf, he contacts her by her email. They arrange to meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a sometimes spiky, sometimes warm friendship ensues. How far the relationship will go remains to be seen. Warren does admit to Deb’s brusque questioning that he’s gay.

The show’s other couple are the romantically attached Claire and Jason, who have just decided to cohabitate, Jason moving into Claire’s apartment. Along with the usual frictions, such a move entails, Claire’s obvious attachment to a love in the past doesn’t make things easy. They argue about the type of wine to bring to a dinner party and Claire worries about their opposite tastes in art when they visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The two couples never officially meet up, but an impetuous act by Warren, abetted by Deb, brings a happy resolution to the thorny nature of Jason and Claire’s attachment, with Gwon showing us how even the slightest intersection of lives in the big city can have momentous consequences.

Gwon’s lyrics are clever and prodigious, but one could wish his music had more tunefulness, more character. There are a couple of instances when the score delivers something like a breakout number, as in Deb’s recounting of her unfulfilling life, ‘Don’t Wanna Be Here’. But for long stretches the score sounds like an extended patter song, occasionally giving way to a semi-melodic passage. It’s only toward the end of the show as Claire comes to a catharsis that the music and the storytelling take on a compelling emotionality.

New orchestrations for piano, reed and bass have been written for this production by Bruce Coughlin, whose Broadway credits include such titles as War Paint, Grey Gardens and Light in the Piazza. They are sometimes arresting, but sometimes so busy they detract from the lyrics.

The four-person cast bring solid personas to their characters, and handle Gwon’s raging flood of lyrics adroitly. Whitney Bashor imbues Claire with grace and an intrinsic poise and finally touches us as well with her climactic revelatory number, ‘I’ll Be Here’. Marc delaCruz fills out Jason nicely with an understated machismo.

As Warren, Kyle Sherman infuses the character with a genuine unabashed sweetness that never becomes cloying and almost acts as a touchstone for the entire narrative. Sarah Lynn Marion’s Deb flavours the proceedings with an amusing ill temper and a more than a touch of Broadway brassiness. Her booming voice is one of the production’s notable assets.

Silverstein’s direction keeps the flow of the show moving smoothly, against Steven Kemp’s unit set of platforms and scrim-covered towers behind which the musicians are situated. Anshuman Bhatia’s lighting adds to the depth of the abstracted cityscape, while Jennifer Paar’s costumes maintain “the sidewalks of New York” aura.

In short, Ordinary Days is not your ordinary musical, but it never quite makes it to extraordinary.

Ron Cohen