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 1962 movie, starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as Joe and Kirsten, is currently streaming, accompanied by an unusual trailer: After excerpting scenes from the film, an announcer introduces Jack Lemmon as “the star of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment,” who then addresses us directly: “When I read this script by JP Miller I knew I wanted to play this part more than any part I’ve been lucky enough to play…I’ve never made a pitch like this for any picture I’ve been connected with. I’m doing it now because I believe so strongly and deeply in the Days of Wine and Roses. I hope you do too.”
What I infer from his pitch is that he thought the film important because it dramatizes a pressing social problem. (Lemmon was reportedly a heavy drinker who sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous)
Members of the musical’s creative team apparently also connect deeply to the material: Guettel has been open about his own struggles, once recalling: “I was an abject, drug-addled wretch, shades drawn, not eating, watching TV all day.”
It’s impossible to argue that alcoholism is no longer a problem; an estimated 140,000 deaths in the United States are attributable each year to excessive alcohol use, which has increased since the outset of the pandemic. But this is nearly matched now by the number of deaths annually from drug-involved overdoses. It seems an odd choice to bring back a story more than sixty years old, which centers around a 1950s-style corporate executive, when there are so many new stories out there about the same problem that reflect more common present-day scenarios.
The libretto by Craig Lucas is surprisingly faithful to the film, scene by scene. Lucas, who also collaborated with Guettel in adapting “The Light in the Piazza,” does make a few smart alterations, mostly toning it down — eliminating, for example, the scenes of straitjacketed Joe in a sanitarium. He also adds some subtly literate touches. But there is nothing close to the kind of ironic distance that reappraises the era in the manner of the TV series “Mad Men.” There’s still a 50s earnestness and sentimentality.
If it was a marketing decision to adapt “Days of Wine and Roses,” it feels doubly odd: The title is now most associated with the Academy Award-winning song of the same name in the movie, by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer…and it is not in the musical.
The dated aspects of the story barely registered when I saw the musical last year Off-Broadway, so enamored I was with the central performances. Now transferred to Broadway, largely intact (with the same creative and design team and eight of the ten cast members the same), the shortcomings still pale beside O’Hara and James’ rendering of the sharp dialogue and the clever songs.
Booze is front and center in the story from the get-go, although we might not realize this when we first meet Joe Clay (James), a mid-level public relations executive recently returned from the Korean War, when he meets his boss’s secretary Kirsten (O’Hara), whom he mistakes for one of the party girls he’s hired as eye candy aboard a yacht owned by one of his clients. As in the movie (and as in most romantic comedies), she is cool to him at first, rebuffing him and his offer of a drink. She doesn’t drink, she replies. “I never have. I don’t like the taste.”
“The taste,” Joe scoffs in song. “It’s for the fun.”
He asks her what she does like. Chocolate, she replies.
So he orders her a Brandy Alexander (which combines crème de cacao with cognac.)
They have fun; fall in love. But the story departs quickly from the promise of a romantic comedy into a cautionary tale; together they descend into recklessness, ruin, recovery, and relapse.
If Joe uses his charm, and alcohol, to win Kirsten over, Guettel employs his own tool of seduction. The thirteen songs in the show are not conventionally hummable – more often recitative than arias – but they demonstrate the immense insight and power that can be generated by the clever use of music and the careful choice of words. Much of the score is composed of different kinds of jazz, reflecting the arc of the story: swinging (sleazy-sounding) jazz that accompanies the joy that Joe and Kirsten take in each other (fueled by alcohol); Andrews Sister-like harmonies; Brubeck-like cool; a be-bop breakdown.
In “Evanesce,” in the first flush of their romance (with each other and with booze), they sing, accompanied by a soft shoe routine, of how they’re “two corks just bobbing around…in the Long Island Sound.”
Kirsten: I’m leaning out the window I’m running with a knife
Joe: I’m riding on an arrow I’m running for my life
Both: What’s the worry. I have you now. You are all I need
They are simultaneously aware of, and oblivious to, their cascading self-destruction. (What are corks used for except for liquor bottles?)
In “Are You Blue,” when the joys of alcohol are souring, Kirsten sings a solo:
“Are you getting down so low there is nowhere else to go?”
Then forcefully answers her own question:
“Hell no!
Not me!
I’m a bright and shiny top
and I live on booze and be-bop”
And then lets out a string of nonsense sounds — seh-dle-doo-dle did-dle-doo-dle did-dle-doo… Language has disintegrated, and so has her life.
It’s important to note that James and O’Hara sing all of the songs and their reprises in the musical – James gets three solos, O’Hara gets seven, the rest are duets. Other than the two stars, only Tabitha Lawing as their daughter Lila gets to sing at all (in two duets with O’Hara and one with James.) Among the non-singing cast, only Byron Jennings as Kirsten’s stalwart father and David Jennings as Joe’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor make much of an impression at all (or, to put it more fairly, are given the chance to do so.) Given its ten-member cast, its nine-piece band, and a slick set with oversized signs that pop into place mid-air, “Days of Wine and Roses” is too big to call a chamber musical. But it is undeniably the Kelli and James Show.
Days of Wine and Roses
Studio 54 through April 28, 2024. Update: Ending March 31
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $78 – $244
Rush tickets for Days of Wine and Roses are available for $49 the morning of each performance on the TodayTix app,
Book by Craig Lucas; Music and lyrics by Adam Guettel; Based on the play by JP Miller; Based on the film by Warner Bros.
Directed by Michael Greif
Choreography by Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia, scenic design by Lizzie Clachan, costume design by Dede Ayite, lighting design by Ben Stanton, sound design by Kai Harada, music direction by Kimberly Grigsby, orchestrations by Adam Guettel and Jamie Lawrence, hair and wigs by David Brian Brown
Cast: Kelli O’Hara as Kirsten Arnesen, Brian d’Arcy James as Joe Clay, Byron Jennings as Arnesen, Tabitha Lawin as Lila, David Jennings as Jim, Sharon Catherine Brown as Mrs. Nolan and others, Tony Carlin as Rad and others, Bill English as Mr. Shaw and others, Olivia Hernandez as Betty and others, Davis Manis as Delaney and others.
