“Ordinary Days”? Hardly

An awful lot is packed into the 80 minutes of “Ordinary Days” – a small musical with a big heart currently playing at the Trafalgar Studios. It’s by a young American (as so many are) – composer/lyricist Adam Gwon – currently blazing a trail through around the fringes of American music theatre and picking up armfuls of awards on route (significant awards like the coveted Fred Ebb Award which he won in 2008). “Ordinary Days” is sharp and smart and fast. It’s four characters – four average young New Yorkers – impact on each other in ways they might not have imagined, the mundane becomes poetic, and a crowning moment of catharsis for all is fancifully delivered as only musicals know how.

But the real ingenuity here is the way in which Gwon embeds his songs into monologue and dialogue (and even a quartet or two) so they spring, so to speak, from the vernacular in such a way as to disguise the fact that they are songs at all. There are private moments – like Jason’s “Favourite Places” – which evolve into full blown numbers, in this case a soaring ballad revealing that such places are the places he’s never been: like his girlfriend Claire’s heart. But mostly the music is governed by the words with quirky and fleetingly ecstatic phrases helping them get airborne.

So, of course, do the voices,  four individuals – Lee William-Davis, Alexia Khadime, Daniel Boys, and Julie Atherton (the last two fresh from Avenue Q) – melded as one. The women have bags of charisma with Khadime keeping the frantic patter song “Calm” on message (inspiration here from Sondheim’s “I’m Calm” from Forum) and Atherton’s final revelation (“Ill Be Here) achieving the impossible and nailing the heartbreak and catharsis (time to “move on”… it’s that Sondheim again) in a mere handful of lines. Musicals can do that and Gwon clearly has a biggie in him sometime soon.

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