Outlook Nights Out: Ordinary Days

Another Big Gay Night Out on the Town...at a Discount! The Short North Stage presents Ordinary Days Friday, March 1 • 8p @ The Garden Theater ONO Discount -$19 Tickets & $3 Rosy Outlook Cocktails Discount Tickets Use Code: OUTLOOK @ http://www.shortnorthstage.org About Ordinary Days: Short North Stage brings one of the freshest and most poignant new musicals of the past few seasons to the Green Room from February 21-March 10. Ordinary Days delighted New York Times critic Charles Isherwood when it opened at Roundabout Theater in 2009. Comparing it to Avenue Q without the puppets and the snarky attitudes, Isherwood wrote that the musical “captures with stinging clarity that uneasy moment in youth when doubts begin to cloud hopes for a future of unlimited possibility." “What am I doing here?” one of the quartet of anxious New Yorkers sings in this genial, quietly affecting show. The same question haunts all of them at one point or another, as the certainty of finding satisfaction seems to recede in the distance, like the last taxi in sight driving off with somebody luckier on a rainy night. The central character of Ordinary Days is a young gay artist named Warren who has a sometimes paralyzing sense of beauty in the simple aspects of life in the City. His hobby is rescuing discarded photos and pieces of lives he finds in the street. Circumstances connect him to Deb, a neurotic graduate student who is struggling to finish a thesis on Virginia Woolf. The other two characters in the ensemble are Jason and Claire, a young couple with relationship issues. The lives of all four slowly and unexpectedly intertwine as they struggle with the vicissitudes of urban life. Under the direction of Pamela Hill, Short North Stage has assembled a cast of professional actors with powerful voices and irresistible charm. Jackie Comisar, who played Missy in last year’s The Marvelous Wonderettes bring great poignancy to the role of Claire. Zack Steele returns to Short North Stage after playing Young Ben in the opening production of Follies. Rounding out the attractive cast are John Robert Armstrong, 32-year-old professor of musical theater at Northern Ohio University as Jason, and Leslie Goddard, who has performed in Hairspray on Broadway and Jersey Boys in Las Vegas, as Deb. Ordinary Days was written by 33-year-old composer/lyricist Adam Gwon, one of the up-and-coming young lights of the New York musical theater scene. Since winning kudos for Ordinary Days, Gwon written new musicals. The Boy Detective Fails, premiered in 2011 at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia. Cloudlands had its world premiere last spring at the South Coast Repertory. He is currently working on a commission from Playwrights Horizons to write a musical based on the novel "Alice Bliss,” about a young girl dealing with the absence of a father called to duty in Iraq. Sets and Props for Ordinary Days were designed by Patrick Allison, whose last project was The Little Dog Laughed and before that the props for Cabaret. Tatjana Longerot, creator of the stylish wardrobes for The Little Dog Laughed, returns to bring New York style to the costumes of Ordinary Days. Ly Apelado, one of central Ohio's most gifted musical directors accompanies the singers with the musical's complex score.