“Ordinary Days” Highlights Connectedness and New Beginnings in NYC

This semester, the Media, Culture, and the Arts program at The King’s College again joined forces with The King’s Players to present the musical Ordinary Days, which played from February 2-4 in the City Room on campus. The matinee performance on Saturday, February 4, featured a talkback afterward with the composer Adam Gwon, a rising star in the musical theater composition world.

The show follows four characters as each of them encounters a pivotal moment in life of wondering exactly what they are doing with themselves and why they are where they are, which happens to be New York City. Warren, an aspiring artist, is employed by another artist…who happens to be incarcerated…as a cat-sitter. Deb, a graduate student in Literature, questions her flailing attempts to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf (whom she “doesn’t even like”). Jason, a dedicated boyfriend, asks himself whether his place in New York City is as established as he thought it was as his relationship runs into difficulties. And Claire, his girlfriend with a dramatic and moving romantic history that is revealed near the end of the musical, wonders if she can return Jason’s love with the certainty he feels toward her. The answers and new beginnings all of them seek ultimately appear in a surprisingly interconnected—and very New York—way.

The four students who starred in the show were Stevie Hernandez (Warren), a freshman; Abbey Jasmine Rose (Deb), a senior; Kaleb Batman (Jason), a junior; and Julia Keesler (Claire), a senior—all of whom have either significant acting experience, plans to pursue theatrical or musical careers after graduation, or both. The show involved an approximately 21-member student crew, including student producer Isabelle McCauley. It was directed by Misti B. Wills and produced by Virginia Hart Pike, adjunct instructor in musical theater at The King’s College, who was also the show’s musical director and piano accompanist.

Pike said, “We chose Ordinary Days for one because we were looking for a chamber piece that would give a select group of students a unique opportunity to grow through rich character development, and develop their vocal abilities as soloists. Doing a small show in an intimate space creates an environment for high growth and visibility. The material itself [also] spoke to us deeply.  This show is about real people living in New York City facing challenges to making their dreams a reality, whether those dreams are to make a huge impact on the world, or simply to find the right relationship. It captures those moments when the barriers to finding fulfillment loom as tall as New York’s skyscrapers.  Sometimes those barriers exist in our own hearts, and sometimes outside of ourselves.  Either way, it usually takes some outside help, or maybe even some Divine intervention, for those barriers to come down.”

Dr. Harry Bleattler, Associate Professor of History and the Humanities and chair of the program in Media, Culture, of the Arts, said, “While the show itself is not faith-based or faith-centered, it concludes with a powerfully redemptive ending. Each character is faced with the need to connect with others in a healthy way in order to live lives of real meaning. By the end of the show, each does so in his or her own specific way. All of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, face the same struggle to find meaning in ourselves and others, and, whether we recognize it or not, God. The characters do this with a great deal of humor. It’s a funny, charming, moving, and magical show—especially for a New York City audience such as ours.”

An unexpected plot twist regarding the show itself surfaced during the talkback with Adam Gwon after the Saturday matinee performance. After talking about his path into musical theater and the process of writing Ordinary Days, Gwon recounted that his inspiration for the musical’s pivotal redemptive scene came from something he happened to see from a gym window “at the top of some random apartment building in Herald Square.” It was discovered afterwards that this apartment building was almost certainly the Herald Towers, which served as the primary women’s residence for King’s students during most of its twelve years at the Empire State Building. And so, this musical about (in part) the mysterious interconnectedness of life in New York City displayed a piece of that very same interconnectedness in the story of its composition. The King’s College was delighted to bring this heartfelt musical back to the place it was born.