![]() ![]() Lizzie Clachan’s sets, full of large translucent panels that are perhaps meant to evoke mod styling but just made me think of Dear Evan Hansen, are unnervingly synthetic.Īll this kept me at a distance from the emotions Days of Wine and Roses intends to find. ![]() Michael Greif, directing, has gotten rich performances from James and O’Hara, but his staging, with the two of them often squished into the center of the Atlantic’s already small stage, the band above them on either side, and troughs of water in front of them, gets claustrophobic. The characters around Joe and Kirsten - played by an ensemble of actors who take on several roles as relatives, sponsors, employers, partygoers, and other figures - are often dully right to the point (“your wife likes danger, so what? That’s not why she drinks,” says Joe’s sponsor). It’s a pity then, when Days of Wine and Roses falls back from those moments of searching ambiguity into the prosaic. It’s a cyclical description of love that’s fascinating in the context of the patterns of addiction, and Guettel sets it over a restless melody that keeps wandering around in your head long after hearing it. If the air and light were key to Piazza, here we get allusions to water and darkness: Joe loves Kirsten, in one song, “As the Water Loves the Stone,” which develops a dense ladder of images that follows from the stone and the water to the stone loving the wind, the wind the raincloud, and the cloud returning to the water below. James has the slightly less showy role than O’Hara, but he sets the tone early on in a song called “Magic Time,” schmoozing his way through a yacht party with drink in hand, slick as his sibilance. Aside from a few moments with their daughter (Ella Dane Morgan), Joe and Kirsten are the only characters who sing, and Guettel has written O’Hara and James a range of styles, from operatic aria-lets to pitter-pattering imitations of jazzy jingles (the Morton Salt Girl recurs as a metaphor). Guettel’s score is worth waiting for, even constrained by the directness of the premise. ![]() (Guettel himself is also in recovery.) Most notably, O’Hara worked with Guettel and book writer Craig Lucas on the shimmering The Light in the Piazza (and it was during workshops for that when she first suggested this story to them), and now, nearly 20 years after that musical’s Broadway premiere, this marks their grand reunion. Still, you can see why this group, who have all excelled in mid-century contexts, wanted to try. A hit at the time, introducing many Americans to a clearer understanding of addiction, the film is also straightforwardly didactic, with a schematic plot - Joe convinces Kirsten to drink, addiction derails their lives, he tries to recover as she has more difficulty - that the musical struggles to expand. The musical’s based on the teleplay by JP Miller, aired as part of the anthology series Playhouse 90 in 1958, and the 1962 film adaptation starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remnick. She abstained from alcohol before meeting him, but he convinces her to start drinking, and they both become hooked. O’Hara plays a secretary named Kirsten, seduced in that moment by Brian d’Arcy James’s PR executive Joe, newly returned from the Korean War and a hard drinker. The first of those moments comes early on in Adam Guettel’s score as she ascends to the stratosphere in a solo called “There Go I” as she sings, “danger / hazard / make me happy / they make me happy / don’t know why.” She sings with such clarity and control, making difficult bits of chromatic recitative look easy, in a way you might take for granted, up to the point where she will hit an emotional swell, open up her soprano, and throw sunlight across a horizon’s worth of clouds. I should start out by talking about Kelli O’Hara’s voice, which is the diamond at the center of Days and Wine and Roses, itself a jewel box of a musical. Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James in Days of Wine and Roses. ![]()
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