A musical adaptation of David Nicholls’s beloved novel One Day is gearing up to take the stage at the West End’s Garrick Theatre in a matter of weeks. Telling the story of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew through twenty years of missed connections, the new musical stars Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose. We stopped by rehearsals to speak to the cast and creative team about translating the story into a musical and why Em and Dex’s love story connects with so many people.
Published in 2009, David Nicholls’ novel has become one of the defining British love stories of its generation, selling more than six million copies worldwide. It’s been adapted both as a Hollywood film and a Netflix TV series, and now it’s going to take the stage as a new musical.
One Day the Musical begins previews at the Garrick Theatre later this month, following a critically acclaimed run at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre earlier this year.
We stopped by rehearsals to speak to director Max Webster, playwright David Greig, composers Abner and Amanda Ramirez, and actors Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose about what it’s like to bring this story to life and why Em and Dex never fail to move people, no matter how their story is told.
Book tickets to One Day the Musical
“The people who know the story will still rediscover it.”
Now that the novel has been adapted into a film, a television series and now a musical, it raises the question: how do you approach such a well-known story?
For David Greig, who wrote the musical’s book, it’s actually about putting that aside. “You start by just telling it to someone who’s never heard it before,” he said, arguing that there will always be people who don’t know the story, and if you instead focus on telling it with “integrity, then people who do know the story will still rediscover it each time.“
He likened it to Romeo and Juliet, where he says “you’d be astonished. People go, ‘so, what happens in this story?'”
Director Max Webster too suggested that even if people know the story, the stage production offers something entirely unique that you don’t quite get from other adaptations.
“There is so much heart, there is so much romance, so much sadness” in David’s novel, and those emotional moments are“great in a book, but they’re even better shared,” he argued.
“Being in a theatre where everyone roars with laughter at the same moment, or being in the theatre where you actually hear people starting to cry, like 1000 people crying at the same time, and doing that communally is really beautiful.”
Writing music from the feeling
For composers Abner and Amanda Ramirez, who record and perform as Johnnyswim, the way into the story was through the emotion. As Abner put it, “so much of writing the music isn’t just the data, it’s the feeling.”
“We’d go back to the source material if we’re writing a specific story,” he clarified. “Or we need to make sure we got our facts right. But really, it was like, how did that scene make me feel? How did this moment?”
That instinct to lean into the feeling led to the first song they wrote for the musical, called ‘Blackbirds.’ That song began with a single word in the novel.
Amanda explained that in the first chapter, Emma and Dexter notice birds chirping outside as the night winds down. For Emma, it is a pang of regret but for Dexter, the night has only just begun. “I underlined blackbirds like four times,” Amanda shared.
She went on to pluck out the melody on the piano, “I sort of figured out what I was hearing and got it out, and that was that. That was the beginning marker of ‘this is what I hear’ when I hear blackbirds.”
She shared too that there’s a moment later, when Dex is in a partying, drunken stupor, and he mentions that he hears blackbirds. “It’s a subtle call back to Emma, even in his like complete drunken haze. And I thought there was something really special about that,” she said.
Abner called the song “our Rosetta Stone,” because it set the musical language for the rest of the show. “That first song really is really important to set the tone and the language that you want to use for the rest of the show,” he argued.
They had conversations about whether to be decade specific in their songs, but in the end, they decided against it, because music that sounded like each decade would become the focus.
“We wanted to have its own musical identity. It was really important for us to find that early,” Abner said.
Going back to the page
One thing that has benefited everyone working on the show is just how rich the source material is. Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose, who star in the musical as Dex and Em, both noted that the novel became an abundant resource during the rehearsal process.
“There is so much depth to the material. It’s impossible to find it all in one go,” Jamie said, as he thought about what’s it’s been like to return to the production after the Edinburgh run. Sharon quickly agreed, saying the inspiration they find is “endless. There’s so much to choose from and so much to bring in on any given day.”
“It’s details. It’s little little nuggets!” Jamie quipped.
Amanda too felt that the source material offered up plenty for the songwriting process.
“There’s a few songs that we really relied on the source material because the source material is so rich,” she explained.
The duo found that some moments from the book, like Dexter writing Emma a letter or leaving her a voicemail, were better when they more closely aligned to what was written. “The letter in the book was one of my favorite things, and so we tried to be as close to the letter as possible.”
“You want buy-in from everyone in the room”
One thing that’s clear is just how collaborative the whole team has been from the beginning. Abner and Amanda had previously only written music alone or with a single co-writer, but getting into the rehearsal room and suddenly having input from Max, David, Jamie and Sharon was something of a learning curve for them .
“The experience of writing a musical is so deeply collaborative,” Abner mused, noting that they have 21 years of experience writing music but it’s usually just the two of them alone in a room, or their co-writer.
When it comes to writing a musical, “you want buy-in from everyone in the room, and everybody’s opinions count just as much as ours do.”
He confirmed that the challenge was one he found exciting. “I found so much joy in being able to anticipate what maybe Jamie’s thoughts going to be when he’s singing that. ‘Oh, that’s not connecting.’ And I get why it’s not connecting. We can say this, but let’s change how he’s saying this,” he mused, illustrating his thought process during rehearsals. “I’m watching his emotional journey as an actor carry this song from beginning to end.”
The duo shared a particular moment from the rehearsal process, when an early draft of one song didn’t quite have Sharon convinced. They recalled how she felt that “[Emma] doesn’t push back enough,” and that she says yes too easily without Dex “earning it.”
“She was so right,” Abner admitted. “We went to another room, and the conversation, the moment, the music blossomed in a day.”
Two actors living twenty years
For the actors, the challenge was carrying a relationship across time. Jamie Muscato, who plays Dexter, described a methodical approach that began with the script.
“We went through the script and did a timeline of where we were and what we’d done in between those years, and what were the big events of those years,” he explained, though audiences won’t necessarily see that on stage. “It’s just for our brains, but just to make a solid human being.”
Sharon agreed, arguing that the specificity actually “helps us be able to create something that’s truthful,” especially when we’re with these characters over such a long period of time.
The most challenging years to play? When they’re furthest apart and “you really start to see the cracks in both of them.”
Returning to the material has also been a great experience, both agreed, as a new rehearsal process has allowed them to go even deeper into the story. Jamie described returning to the rehearsal process a “luxury” because “knowledge-wise, we can just kind of dig even deeper.”
The best part of returning to rehearsals for Max has been watching the show evolve even more. “We’ve got some really cracking new songs that Abner and Amanda have written. David’s done great work on the script, and I think getting to work again with Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose is a real joy because they were wonderful in Edinburgh,” he explained.
“Being able to re-explore it, they found new depth, new colors, and roles. They’ve really been able to grapple and take ownership of it.”
Why Dex and Em feel so universal
The team were all in agreement about the staying power of Em and Dex’s love story, no matter the medium. According to David, “it’s the story of love through time, and that’s an eternal story,” and that if a couple of ancient Romans watched the show, they would still understand it.
Max agreed with the sentiment, arguing that it’s the combination of “the very banal and practical with the kind of cosmic and poetic is really moving and really exciting.” The idea that these characters are just living their “mundane everyday life,” as they grapple with big questions is part of what makes it connect.
He argued that part of the beauty of the book, and of the story is that “so many people from so many different backgrounds see themselves in these characters. They manage to be almost like algebraic in their clarity. We can project ourselves so brilliantly onto them.”
Jamie, likewise, rejected the idea that the characters are special. “They’re not superheroes,” he said. “They are human beings who happen to fall in love with each other.”
Sharon agreed, recalling how she’d hear audiences in Edinburgh making the same comments. “People would come and afterwards just be like, ‘Oh my God, that’s me.'” The story is more like “people watching” she argued. “If there’s a massive group of people at a pub, we’re just zooming in on this couple,” who could be anyone at all.
That, more than any single plot point, may explain why Emma and Dexter keep finding new audiences in every medium they enter.
One Day the Musical runs at the Garrick Theatre from 17 November 2026 to 14 March 2027.
Garrick Theatre, London
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