Adam Gwon, who wrote the music and lyrics for Ordinary Days recently finished its three-day run as part of the Playhouse Square/Baldwin Wallace annual collaboration. In fact, he has been a part of the production since an early rehearsal when he visited with the cast and creative team. He also did a talkback after the Saturday evening performance.
Gwon was selected as one of The Dramatist magazine’s “50 to Watch” and praised by The New York Times as “a promising newcomer to our talent-hungry musical theater with songs that are funny, urbane, with a sweetness that doesn’t cloy.”
The play, much like the new trend in dramatic musicals, doesn’t follow the traditional format of two-act, Golden Age of the American scripts. It is a series of interconnected scenes, in which the characters and plot unfold through songs and no dialogue. Think of it as an opera without the arias, overblown characters or overly dramatic plots.
In Ordinary Days we meet two young New York couples, Warren and Deb and Jason and Claire. The former become acquainted when Claire, a college student, loses her diary, which contains notes for her dissertation. Jason, a free-spirited artist with a secret to hide, distributes square pieces of colored paper adorned with affirmation phrases on the streets of the Big Apple.
After an exhausting search through the galleries of the New York Museum of Art, the duo finally gets together to exchange the diary. The meeting is in front of Warren’s favorite painting, a piece of art that Deb doesn’t appreciate. Conflicted attraction takes place. We all know where this storyline is going to go.
Danny BÓ, he of owl eyes, mobile face and Shirley Temple curls, is delightful as Warren. The diminutive BW senior, who has been seen onstage at such venues as Great Lakes Theater, Beck Center and the Idaho Shakespeare Center, has a wonderful touch for comedy and farce, and his magnetism lights up the stage. He is definitely Broadway-ready and we should see him on NY stages in a short time.
Jaedynn Latter, who portrays Deb, is a charming Southern California BW Musical Arts student, and a perfect match for BÓ. She too knows how to play comedy and captivate an audience. She has a fine singing voice, as evidenced in “Calm,” one of the show’s highlights. “Beautiful,” a Warren and Deb duo, was captivating.
In contrast to the quirky Warren and Deb, Jason (Dario Alvarez) and Claire (Maggie Solimine) are the tale’s serious duo. He is in love and carries an engagement ring, just waiting for the opportune moment to pop the question. She has a deep secret that is stopping her from making a complete commitment to Jason or, as it turns out, anyone. Their “Fine” is cute and a score standout.
Both Alvarez and Solimine, as should be expected from students enrolled in one of the finest musical theater programs in the country and being trained by the likes of Victoria Bussert, the multi-Cleveland Critics Circle and BroadwayWorld-Cleveland best director awards winner and the Director of the BW Music Theatre program, have fine singing voices and performed well.
The Helen’s black box intimate theatre, Matthew Webb’s music (though I would have preferred a small orchestra to soften sound of the harshness of a single piano) and Russ Borski’s scenic, costume and lighting designs, all added to the quality of the production.
Gwon says of Bussert and Baldwin Wallace, “I’ve always admired Vicky for being really invested and investing her students in the process of new work…one of the things I love about writing shows is that you’re really you…let other people bring their point of view and put their own stamp on it, and that to me is something that’s so exciting about theater is that every production is going to be different, because every team of people is bringing something new to the piece.
He continues, “The show is built to have that kind of openness to interpretation. It’s not meant to be replicated exactly the same way every time. The script is the same, the songs are the same, but the interpretation is always so different, so I’m particularly excited to see how Vicky’s interpretation and my reaction to it will have evolved as we’ve evolved as people since the show came into our lives.”
He also stated, “One of the reasons I find Baldwin Wallace’s Music Theater program so exciting is that they are…invested in what’s coming down the pike, the new writers, the new musicals, which I think is such a vital part of not only the theater community that the students are going to enter…but just the lifeblood of theater as an art form. If we’re not introducing audiences and introducing new artists to new work, we’re just recycling the same old thing, and that’s not how art moves forward.”
