REVIEW: ORDINARY DAYS by Adam Gwon at Upstairs at the Gatehouse 22 – 27 April 2025
‘it’s fun and it’s light as a feather’★★★★
The New York skyline, so familiar, and a shy, awkward young man distributing leaflets to the passers-by who are rushing by too busy to lift their eyes or notice him or the messages he’s promoting. The opening of a joyful, hopeful musical about ordinary days in which ordinary lives will find their own extraordinary moments of connection and joy in other people.
The musical itself is 15 years old and opens with an absolute banger as our shy young man, new to town, knowing no-one but endlessly optimistic that life will smile on him, sets the scene with a rapid-fire and soaring song accompanied by unexpectedly balletic pirouettes. It’s the high point of the show (not always good to begin with your stellar number but absolutely fine here in settling an audience who know they’re in for a good time).
Warren (Aidan Cutler) is sweet, socially awkward, not an obvious catch. Deb (Dora Gee) is a student, up from the sticks, a dork in New York, failing to persuade her professors that she knows anything about Virginia Woolf for the simple reason that she doesn’t like her or her work. And Claire (Melissa Camba) and Jason (James Edge) fill out the four-strong cast, a couple not entirely sure they should be together – he says Cabernet, she says Austrian Riesling, etc etc – but giving it a try out. There’s nowhere lonelier than a huge city where everyone else seems to be succeeding and enjoying life and you don’t know any of them or how to get in.
It’s a musical without a book – songs only to carry the perhaps too-separate stories of the singletons who meet and make a connection and the couple who’ve met and might be ready to split apart. And that works fine, even if the solo numbers and duets work better than slightly muddy ensemble pieces when the four of them occupy the same stage space if not quite the same life space. Aidan Cutler in particular is a treat, a brilliant voice, comic timing and an agility that’s as beautiful as its initially unexpected. He brings a real warmth to his awkward character, a man who could be lovely but presents as a bit of an oddball. The scenes in which he and Dora Gee (sharp, cynical, funny performance) connect in an art gallery then a coffee shop are witty and inventive and the most affecting in the show, as well as having some excellent audience non-participation comedy thrown in.
So it’s fun and it’s light as a feather, both in terms of being simply enjoyable in its own right and in having nothing particularly profound or original to say about the human condition or how we get from loneliness to togetherness. It sags a little towards the end, the songs feeling a little musically repetitive even as they continue to carry the story very effectively, but overall a thoroughly pleasing experience and one that should leave all but the stony-hearted happier going out of the auditorium than they were going in.
ORDINARY DAYS by Adam Gwon at Upstairs at the Gatehouse 22 – 27 April 2025
Directed by Karl Steele
Presented by Old Joint Stock Theatre
Box Office: https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173659331
Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London)
