Days of Wine and Roses Broadway Reviews

Always a composer of intricacy, Mr. Guettel mostly eschews traditional musical-theater forms and simplified melodies; his lyrics here are sometimes conversational, sometimes fragmentary, reflecting the characters’ muddled psyches and their conflicting desires: for the high and the happy blur of booze, but also stable ground upon which their marriage can right itself. Music and lyrics reflect both aspects in the duet “Evanesce,” as Kirsten sings, “I’m leaning out the window, I’m running with a knife,” to which Joe ripostes, “I’m riding on an arrow, I’m running for my life.” Then, together, “I have you now, you are all I need.” In a single song, we see the dynamic that runs throughout the show: abiding love at war with destructive impulses.

What's astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.

Most important, Greif obtains truly awesome performances from O’Hara and d’Arcy James. Even if you removed the two actors’ vocals, which are phenomenal, the performances stand on their own — especially the motel room scene where Joe finds Kirsten on an extended bender. O’Hara and d’Arcy James are musical theater stars, but with “Days of Wine and Roses,” we can only mourn all those great “straight” performances they never delivered. Who knows? This gig could open up a whole other door for them in the theater.

It’s probably a good thing there’s no intermission in Days of Wine and Roses, the musical adaptation of Blake Edwards’s 1962 film. The harrowing and hugely captivating Broadway production wastes no time diving into the toll that alcoholism takes on married couple Kirsten and Joe Clay, and it’s doubtful any audience member would be inclined to pony up for a mid-show sippy cup of Chardonnay. Director Michael Greif’s production is shot through with heartache and hangovers, and worth all the squirming in your seat.

While the musical respects the film’s structure and setting (though the location is moved from San Francisco to New York City) and recycles much of the original dialogue, it proves to be one of the relatively few theatrical adaptations that expands upon its cinematic source material, as seen in how the score (which is grounded in mid-century jazz) artfully captures the characters’ circumstances (including the high-flying, euphoric rush of endless cocktails) and subsequent breakdowns and melancholy.

Chalk it up to theatrical arts of the first order – acting, direction, book and Guettel’s mesmerizing operatic bebop – that we’re soon hand-in-shaky hand with characters who haven’t a clue how to break the cycle of whiskey-ice-repeat. We’re transported back in time by Kirstin’s lovely sleeveless, A-line cocktail dress (Dede Ayite designed the costumes, showing, among other things, how you really do Barbie), a delightful look that quickly enough gives way to ratty old Baby Jane Hudson bathrobes. And watch Joe morph from Man In a Gray Flannel Suit to rumpled slob in yesterday’s slept-ins, all inhabiting a midcentury modern world, perfectly designed by Lizzie Clachan, that seems by turns airy and claustrophobic.

Even then, at the very least, you will be unbearably grateful to have heard the clarion, celestial voices of the wonderful Kelli O’Hara, in her finest stage performance to date as the naïve secretary Kirsten Arnesen, and the sublime Brian D’Arcy James as the more worldly PR man Joe Clay, who fall in love with each other and the bottle.

One strength of the 90-minute intermissionless piece is its refusal to offer any easy explanation of addiction’s origins, on the assumption that explanations don’t carry much meaning when the alcoholic’s throes are what need to be immediately addressed. When Kirsten and Joe first spend time together at a waterfront, she tells him that she prefers to watch the water farther out. The water immediately below her, she insists, is too dirty. That’s all the rationale needed to set the parameters for this bold, unflinching musical gaze at drinking to cruel excess.

Understanding the roots of dependency starts by acknowledging that people do drugs – drink booze, take opiates, smoke, shoot up – because it feels better doing them than not doing them. So it is for Joe and Kirsten Clay, and by not shying away from the good vibrations that controlled substances promise, this new Days of Wine and Roses is a small step in the right direction toward making a difference in America’s current addiction crisis. Which is not to say that very many opioid addicts are likely to find their way to a Lucas/Guettel musical; but those who make public policy, or who simply look down their noses at “those people in the red states,” very well may. Developing sympathy for, and taking steps to help, the growing numbers of those struggling with and dying of addiction begins by recognizing that some of “those people” are no further away than the house or apartment next door.

Guettel’s score has the feel of a chamber opera. For moments of drunken euphoria, it dabbles in cocktail jazz: Passages in “Evanesce” sound like vocalese, and in “Are You Blue?” O’Hara scats bebop to herself. But most of it takes an art-song approach, eschewing strong melodies in favor of moment-to-moment expression; some of the lyrics rhyme, some don’t. (The eight-piece band, conducted by Kimberly Grigsby, also plays a lot of underscoring.) This is demanding stuff, both dramatically and musically, but it couldn’t ask for better interpreters than O’Hara and James, two of Broadway’s finest singing actors. Both are superb: Playing “two people stranded at sea,” they navigate their characters’ desperate highs and lows—Joe has a breakdown with flashbacks to his military service, Kirsten hits rock bottom as a slattern in a dingy hotel—with depth, grit and vocal expertise. Byron Jennings, as Kirsten’s heartsick Norwegian father, provides exceptional support.

In less skilled hands, these flawed characters could push the audience away or else flatten into scapegoats. But James and O'Hara don't let that happen for a second. O'Hara's Kirsten contains multitudes beneath a sheltered, sunny air, including a zeal for what her favorite books describe as "the human desire penetrate the unknown" — like the world of booze. James's Joe is magnetic such that when he trades his drunken aggressiveness for tenderness, we immediately root for him again. James and O'Hara's sparkling chemistry is effortless, entirely convincing us of their deep love even in their darkest moments — and those moments become all the more arresting as a result.

Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel, whose book and music for The Light in the Piazza lavishly replicated the dizziness of young love 20 years ago, turn their top-shelf craft toward bleaker outlooks in their adaptation of Days of Wine and Roses. Transferring to Broadway after a well-received premiere at the Atlantic last summer, Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James give astonishing voice to two lovers drowning in alcoholism. The subject matter is almost corrosively downbeat but, with its two leads at the top of their game, the one-act musical becomes a cathartic, deeply felt tonic.

Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara return to Broadway for the first time together since 2002 to portray a couple who fall in love with alcohol as much as with one another in this musical adaptation of a dark story that was first a television drama in the 1950s, then a movie. They last performed together on Broadway in a musical adaptation of another dark movie set in the 1950s, “Sweet Smell of Success.” They were relative newcomers then. It’s thrilling to see them back together for his sixteenth and her thirteenth role on Broadway. The two stars carry “Days of Wine and Roses,” their exquisite voices bringing out the brilliance of Adam Guettel’s jazz-inflected, often operatic score, and investing the characters’ rocky emotional journeys with a credibility that few other performers could match. They justify bringing to Broadway an adaptation of a story that feels dated.

The twin lead performances are musically exquisite and courageous to boot; the target audience for this melancholy musical will be Guettel’s many fans as well as admirers of stars willing to head to a tough place with only each other for company. Watching O’Hara in particular is to be drawn as ever to her voice but also to watch her explore self-destruction in a way few of her fans ever will have experienced.

Of course, there is a perspective from which too much grousing about Days of Wine and Roses feels unkind: Lucas has been sober for 19 years, Guettel went through his own journey to sobriety more recently, and O’Hara has told the story of a woman thanking her after the show and whispering, in parting, “23 years.” If the show—if any show—strikes someone, somewhere, for some reason, to the heart, well, so shines a good deed in a weary world. And yet… I hunger for more. O’Hara and James are capable of leaving us not simply pensive, but elated and shattered, if they had a show that would let them.

There is also the strained union between this relatively mundane plot, not unlike a PSA about the dangers of alcoholism, and the poetic, dynamic songs by Adam Guettel, who also collaborated with O’Hara and book writer Craig Lucas on “The Light in the Piazza.” Fizzy and jazzy during the couple’s soused courtship, delicate and melancholy in the aftermath of their downfall, the score is a rich and undeniably gorgeous vehicle for the production’s stars, and especially O’Hara, for whom the adaptation has long been a passion project.

What also distinguishes it are its Broadway royalty-level, award-garlanded stars, Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James (Tony-nominated this year for Into the Woods), who are more familiar to audiences for playing good or engaging lead characters. Instead, here they play a couple on a relentlessly degrading, depressing, downward spiral. As Kirsten Arnesen and Joe Clay, at least for the first 10 minutes, they represent the kind of sexy partnership who would ordinarily fizz and shine—both are attractive and charming performers—but in Days of Wine and Roses they fall to pieces in front of us, the most toxic of partnerships in free fall.