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Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara in Days of Wine and Roses.
Photo: Joan Marcus
For yet another week, there’s a mother-son musical act downtown, although the Encores! Mary Rodgers revival Once upon a time there was a mattress and the Broadway premiere of his son Adam Guettel’s play. Days of wine and roses do whiplash-inducing double duty. Mattress is abundantly light and springy, a favorite of high school drama programs, while Guettel’s musical interpretation of Blake Edwards’ 1962 film (based on a television script by JP Miller), is a darkly adult affair , although it is also clearly a work, and a story, of love. Its star, Kelli O’Hara, brought up the idea of adapting Edwards’ film to Guettel 20 years ago, when they were working on The light in the square, a show that would put them both in the bright light. (O’Hara was nominated for a Tony for the first time and Guettel won one for Best Original Score.) O’Hara knew that he wanted to work with Brian d’Arcy James on the project and Guettel recruited his Square collaborator Craig Lucas to write the book. Now, two decades later, and after an Off-Broadway run in the Atlantic, the project is palpably personal. “It’s a partnership like no other I’ve ever had,” James told the Timeswhile O’Hara said: “I have never been so passionate about something in my life.”
These are some big superlatives, but they seem fair: Days of wine and roses has been built around and for O’Hara and James, who are at the top of their art. O’Hara sings all but four of the songs in the play, and his voice is the kind of instrument that makes people reach for metaphors. It is a prism, an alpine current, a golden snitch: clear, bright and fast, infinitely agile and controlled. He sings like Ginger Rogers dances. And James’ smooth, deceptively mutable, soulful baritone is a beautiful complement to her. She is playing a public relations man for the mad Men era and persuasion, and his voice fits the role. Sometimes everything is a nice surface. Other times, he lets us in: he becomes loud and vulnerable, or takes on an unpleasant tone, or, as when he sings the show’s central imploring ballad, “As the Water Loves the Stone” to O’Hara, he becomes soft and soft enough to support a newborn’s head.
So why, with such a radiant double center, Days of wine and roses Do you feel limited, a little narrow and flat? For all that vocal brilliance (and the leads’ true chemistry), the show evokes a specific kind of quietly disheartened sigh. It is the sound of great talents put at the service of the material that almost expand to accommodate them, but not completely, and it’s a very common sound on Broadway.
That material perhaps contained more, to quote O’Hara’s character, “danger/risk” in 1962, when drinking under the table every night was a fairly normal, even quite elegant, form of socialization, and when alcoholism, if taken seriously at all, it was considered a simple lack of willpower, an unpleasant deficiency of character rather than an illness. (“Everyone my parents knew drank, drank, drank, drank,” Lucas told the Times. “They thought you were a pill if you didn’t do it.”) The story of Days of wine and roses is grimly simple: PR guy Joe Clay (James) meets secretary Kirsten Arnesen (O’Hara) at a business party. He carries several cocktails; She doesn’t drink, but by the end of the night she has had her first Alexander brandy, they have kissed for the first time, and they have begun the long, wet slide into the Mariana Trench of addiction.
The show accompanies them in deep sea diving. “We’re two people stranded at sea,” Joe and Kirsten sing as we begin. A thin moat filled with real water runs across the front of Lizzie Clachan’s set, and lighting designer Ben Stanton often uses it to bathe O’Hara and James in fickle blue reflections. On her first date, Kirsten, an avid reader of Draper’s self-cultureto (real) series of books that scratch his intellectual itch in an era that has limited that side of his life: he sings to Joe about Niagara Falls (“Five to ten people pass by every year / In tubes, boxes and barrels / Everybody thinks that they are going to live/they are not”) and about “the Atlantic cable”: “Because it was so heavy they let it fall twice / To the bottom / Thousands and thousands of feet…” Then, drunk and dizzy, they celebrate together: “Sometimes I feel like a dowser in the desert / … I’m flying across the ocean / Swimming in the air,” Joe sings. Kirsten joins him cheerfully: “Two dolphins breaking a wave / Two dolphins straight to the grave.”
For a story about the messy implosion of two lives, there’s a stultifying neatness to Days of Wine and Roses. He double-underlines his metaphors and marks his destination with signs as figuratively neon-lit as the real ones that enter and exit the set to indicate various bars, delis, and motels. It doesn’t take long for a good portion of the audience to start making audible noises of concern and disapproval whenever Joe or Kirsten go out for a drink, and while these sharp inhalations, prophetic “Mmms” and “Oohs” indicate participation, They also indicate an acceptance of inevitability. There are moments when, for all the brilliant complexity of Guettel’s score, the work feels like a 105-minute AA advertisement. His score contains more ambivalence than his message. He can’t quite break away from didacticism, even though James and O’Hara, and the sweet-voiced Tabitha Lawing, who plays their mostly self-raising young daughter, Lila, are committed to communicating the depth of these characters. ‘they love each other as much as they are to illustrate their disastrous slow descent.
Like that love, the roses in the play’s title are as important as the wine (although, to be technical, the wine barely appears in Joe and Kirsten’s story; they are people who drink hard liquor). Kirsten’s surly and protective father (Byron Jennings) runs a plant nursery, and that’s where the couple makes their first serious attempt at drying out… and suffers their first catastrophic fall. The nursery is a double symbol: it is the lovers’ attempt to grow, learn to nurture and care, and it is a lush, blooming paradise, humid and romantic, reminding them of the glorious, fleeting sensations they think they are missing. . “There’s a man who loves you / Like the water loves the stone,” Joe sings to Kirsten, extending the lyrics to follow this love from the stone to the hillside, from the hillside to the wind, from the wind to the rain . and from the rain back to the stone: “So everything is circular / and nothing is alone.” It is a beautiful ring of poetry and it is also, like the addiction they share, a sinister cycle.
There is voluptuousness in Guettel’s songs, but director Michael Greif never fully leans into it. Her staging seems incredibly neat, despite Joe and Kirsten’s passionate free fall. Even when the illuminated sliding panels on the back wall of Clachan’s clean, square main set open to reveal the nursery and its flower-filled shelves and beams, neither the staging nor the stage action goes as far as it should. could, either towards manic ecstasy or towards rock bottom. There’s something particularly depressing about the plastic flowers on stage, and the nursery is full of them. Yes, real flowers are expensive and impractical, and supposedly unfortunate, but a show like this still wants to find a way to appeal to our senses: it wants to smell a little sweet and glow with greenhouse sweat. And when Joe, in a horrific fit of drunkenness, destroys the greenhouse in search of a bottle he has hidden in one of the flower pots, he wants to feel wild, brutal and tragically dirty. We must fear that the mud will hit us. But while James sways and gets angry in a thin voice, we can also see him carefully tossing all the pots. abovestage to destroy them: the background of the stage must be kept clear for the next scene transition. It’s cool, practical and debilitating.
Especially considering what Kirsten admits she craves: danger. And, as both she and Joe lurch toward a desire for recovery (with painfully contradictory results), there’s also, perhaps inevitably, a whiff of broad sentimentality that creeps in. They are both most thunderous when they sing the word “sorry” from the center. stage, with open arms and faces flushed with absolution. While Guettel and Lucas try to keep things more complex than your average AA meeting, you can only turn down so much of the biggest, loudest, most prominent gesture on your own show.
Of course, there is a perspective from which too many complaints about Days of wine and roses feels unpleasant: Lucas has been sober for 19 years, Guettel took his own journey toward sobriety more recently, and O’Hara has told the story of a woman thanking him after the show and whispering, as she said goodbye, “23 years.” If the show, if there is any show, touches the heart of someone, somewhere, for some reason, well, that’s how a good deed shines in a tired world. And yet… I’m hungry for more. O’Hara and James are capable of leaving us not simply pensive, but euphoric and shattered, if only they had a show that would allow it.
Days of wine and roses It’s in Studio 54.