Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” is one of those songs that have an ability to transport you instantly back to an era. The minute you hear the power-pop classic’s chugging guitar rhythms and the line “I wanna love somebody,” you’re back in 1991, when plaid was the uniform, mix tapes were the perfect gift, and slacking was an art form.

In fact, the hit, and the album named for it, were about the dissolving of Sweet’s marriage and the start of a new relationship. But we all bring our own different memories to music. And that’s why the new musical Girlfriend is so interesting: it personalizes the sounds of an era in unconventional ways.

“Sometimes you listen to a piece of music from a moment of time and it’s like a time capsule,” says Chris Lam, who’s directing and producing Girlfriend for Fighting Chance Productions, speaking over the phone with the Straight before the show’s opening. “The interesting thing about this musical is that it uses this existing music threaded into the play. The author, Todd Almond, uses the music in a really loving way; it’s clear that he loves the music and the music is the way into the language of love.”

Girlfriend turns out to be anything but a story about a girlfriend. Instead, set in 1993, it’s about two boys in Nebraska (Sweet’s home state) in their last year of high school, and they’re negotiating their future and their relationship to one another. Featuring just two actors (Julian Galipeau and Scott McGowan) and a four-piece rock band that acts as a kind of chorus, the show centres intimately on Mike, a popular football player, and Will, a bit of a social outcast.

“It feels like a play with music,” explains Lam, who was first intrigued by the new musical when he watched a short trailer for it by California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre. “The catalyst is that Mike creates a mixed tape of Girlfriend and gives it to this boy Will, and that is kind of the start of their romance.

“But it’s Nebraska in 1993, and there are restrictions and limitations on being out and being themselves,” he stresses. “So they don’t carry it out, but they feel something toward each other. It’s a sensitive story, it’s just them and their relationship and the progression of that. It has a quiet quality to it, but with the music of Matthew Sweet it comes to life for them.”

The show keeps Sweet’s original music as raw and guitar-strafed as the original album did.

“This is one of the best rock musicals I’ve looked into,” declares Lam, a fan of musicals who’s perhaps best-known for his more dramatic acting and directing work at Ensemble Theatre Company. “It really is pure rock music.”

That big sound plays off a tight focus. Girlfriend takes place in the small NEST theatre on Granville Island, with seating divided to create two sides of an alley. “They exist in their own little playing field—isolated in their own bubble,” Lam says. “I felt it’s such an intimate story between the two, let’s not pull away.”

Fighting Chance Productions presents Girlfriend at the NEST on Granville Island until December 21.