Green Room’s second production is doubly sweet

To juxtapose Neil Patrick Harris’ fantastic 2012 Tony Awards opening monologue-a-song, “what if life was a musical?”, Green Room exemplify that musicals don’t always have to make a big song and dance, with a beautifully intimate production of Adam Gwon’s charmingly restrained yet heart-warming Ordinary Days.

Ordinary Days is a refreshingly honest and funny musical about making real connections in the city that never sleeps (but probably should at some point). The theme of the alienation of city living is explored through four characters whose lives fleetingly intersect one Saturday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The motley quartet consists of a budding artist confined to cat-sitting, a stroppy grad student who has mislaid her crucial thesis notes, a mercurial young woman with a damaged heart, struggling to put the past behind her and her lover who knows he's found "the one" and just wants commitment.

Told through a series of intricately connected songs and vignettes, Ordinary Days is an original musical about growing up and enjoying the view, and Gwon captures with stinging clarity that uneasy, interim period of life when youthful optimism and unlimited possibility becomes distorted by reality, doubts and paying the bills.

This is the second production by this new musical company, following their debut last year with Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, performed in Edinburgh, Birnam and Aberdeen. Michael Davies and Sarah Haddath return along with new additions Darren Philip Johnson and Caroline Hood, who bring fantastic voice to a company going from strength to strength.

Gwon’s combination of emotive and comical moments, heightened by split-second timing in many of the dialogue segments and musical numbers is the perfect vehicle for this talented company, whose ethos aims to broaden the definition of musical theatre to include all forms of storytelling to communicate directly with the audience. In fact Green Room’s “ordinariness” in their choice of productions and composers they chose to showcase highlights their broad appeal, as everyone’s story is interesting and everyone has a story to tell.

And as long as there are stories, no matter what art form you chose to tell them in, it’s a reminder that all stories can inadvertently touch on the lives of strangers.

At the Scottish Storytelling Centre 21-23 Jun, 7.30pm. 0131 556 9579 to book

Ordinary Days event details and video preview

Lindsay Corr is Marketing Officer at Scottish Storytelling Centre