Musicals don't always have to make a big song and dance, and Adam Gwon's sung-through effort certainly doesn't. Its restrained minimalism is part of its charm, something reflected in Alistair Turner's nifty, unobtrusive design, which effortlessly suggests the New York skyline. The well-worn theme of the alienation of city living is explored through four people – a would-be artist, a dissatisfied student who has mislaid the crucial notes for her thesis, a young woman with a damaged heart and her lover who wants her to commit – whose lives briefly intersect one Saturday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's no more than that, and its very ordinariness is part of its appeal, a reminder that everyone's story is interesting, and that all our narratives inadvertently touch on the lives of strangers.
Perhaps it's a little bit navel-gazing, sometimes a touch bland, and in the end it veers dangerously close to sentimentality. There's even a song called Sort-of Fairy Tale, which this is. But the show's heart is always visibly beating, particularly in songs such as I'll Be Here, and Gwon finds a way to ingeniously thread his stories together with a minimum of narrative fuss, while offering witty lyrics and strong characters.
In the case of the latter, he's given a helping hand by a terrific quartet of performers including Lee William-Davis as Warren, a goofy young man unsure of his role in life, who really wants to make people see the world around them; and Daniel Boys as Jason, who knows he's found "the one". Even better are Alex Khadime, whose attacking style gets real comic mileage out of the prickly, stroppy and unhappy grad student, Deb; and Julie Atherton, whose Claire is a mercurial, many-facetted creature struggling to put the past behind her and create a new story, this time with a happy ever after.
