For another week, there’s a musical mother-and-son act in midtown, though the Encores! revival of Mary Rodgers’s Once Upon a Mattress and the Broadway premiere of her son Adam Guettel’s Days of Wine and Roses make a whiplash-inducing double feature. Mattress is abundantly light and springy, a favorite of junior-high theater programs, while Guettel’s musical rendering of the 1962 film by Blake Edwards (itself based on a teleplay by JP Miller), is a darkly adult affair — though it’s also clearly a labor, and a story, of love. Its star, Kelli O’Hara, floated the idea of adapting Edwards’s film to Guettel 20 years ago, when they were at work on The Light in the Piazza, a show that would put them both in the bright lights. (O’Hara was nominated for a Tony for the first time, and Guettel won one for Best Original Score.) O’Hara knew she wanted to work with Brian d’Arcy James on the project, and Guettel recruited his Piazza collaborator Craig Lucas to write the book. Now, two decades on—and after an Off Broadway run at the Atlantic—the project is palpably personal. “It is a partnership like no other that I’ve had,†James told the Times, while O’Hara said, “I’ve never been so passionate about anything in my life.â€
Those are some big superlatives, but they feel fair: Days of Wine and Roses has been built around and for O’Hara and James, both of whom are at the peak of their artistry. O’Hara sings all but four of the play’s songs, and her voice is the kind of instrument that sends people scrabbling for metaphors. It’s a prism, an alpine stream, a Golden Snitch — clear, shimmering and darting, endlessly agile and controlled. She sings like Ginger Rogers dances. And James’s suave, deceptively mutable and poignant baritone is a beautiful complement for her. He’s playing a PR man of the Mad Men era and persuasion, and his voice fits the part. Sometimes it’s all pleasant surface. Other times, we’re let in — it gets high and vulnerable, or gains a nasty edge, or—as when he sings the show’s central imploring ballad, “As the Water Loves the Stone†to O’Hara—it goes soft and gentle enough to support a newborn’s head.
So why, with such a radiant double center, does Days of Wine and Roses feel constrained, a little narrow and flat? Despite all that vocal brilliance—and the leads’ real chemistry—the show evokes a specific kind of quietly disheartened sigh. It’s the sound of great talents put in the service of material that will almost expand to accommodate them, but not quite, and it’s a very common sound on Broadway.
That material perhaps held more, to quote O’Hara’s character, “danger / hazard†in 1962, when drinking yourself under the table nightly was a pretty normal, even pretty classy form of socializing, and when alcoholism, if it was taken seriously at all, was considered a simple failure of willpower, a distasteful character deficiency instead of an illness. (“Everyone my parents knew drank, drank, drank, drank;†Lucas told the Times. “You were thought to be a pill if you didn’t.â€) The story of Days of Wine and Roses is a bleakly straightforward one: PR-guy Joe Clay (James) meets secretary Kirsten Arnesen (O’Hara) at a business party. He’s several cocktails in; she doesn’t drink — but by the end of the night she’s had her first brandy Alexander, they’ve had their first kiss, and they’ve started on the long, wet slide into the Mariana Trench of addiction.
The show’s imagery goes deep-sea diving along with them. “Two people stranded at sea / Two people stranded are we†sing Joe and Kirsten as we begin. A thin moat full of 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 mercurial blue reflections. On their first date, Kirsten—an enthusiastic reader of Draper’s Self-Culture, a (real) series of books that scratch her intellectual itch in an era that has limited that side of her life—sings to Joe about Niagara Falls (“Five to ten people go over each year / In tubes and boxes and barrels / They all think that they’re gonna live / They don’t.â€) and about “the Atlantic cableâ€: “Because it was so heavy they dropped it twice / All the way to the bottom / Thousands and thousands of feet…†Later, tipsy and giddy, they celebrate together: “Sometimes I feel like I’m a dowser in the desert / … I’m flying through the ocean / Swimming in the air,†sings Joe. Kirsten joins him merrily: “Two dolphins breakin’ a wave / Two dolphins right to the grave.â€
For a story about the messy implosion of two lives, there’s a stultifying neatness to Days of Wine and Roses. It double-underlines its metaphors and points to its destination with signs as figuratively neon-lit as the actual ones that fly in and out of the set to denote various bars, delicatessens, 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 goes for a drink — and while these sharp inhalations, prescient “Mmms,†and “Oohs†signal engagement, they also signal a settling into inevitability. There are times when, for all the glinting complexity of Guettel’s score, the play feels like a 105-minute-long ad for AA. Its music holds more ambivalence than its message. It can’t quite bust out of the cincher of 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’ love for each other as much as they are to illustrating their disastrous slow descent.
Like that love, the roses of the play’s title are as important as the wine (though, to be technical, wine hardly features in Joe and Kirsten’s story; they’re hard-liquor people). Kirsten’s surly, protective father (Byron Jennings) runs a plant nursery, and that’s where the couple make their first serious attempt at drying out — and take their first catastrophic fall off the wagon. The nursery is a double symbol: It’s the lovers’ attempt at growth, learning to nurture and take care, and it’s a lush, blooming paradise, wet and romantic, reminding them of the glorious, ephemeral highs of sensation they believe they’re missing. “There is a man who loves you / As the water loves the stone,†sings Joe to Kirsten, extending the lyric 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’s a beautiful ring of poetry, and it’s also, like the addiction they share, an ominous cycle.
There’s a voluptuousness in Guettel’s songs, but director Michael Greif never fully leans into it. His staging feels inhibitingly tidy, despite Joe and Kirsten’s passionate freefall. Even when the sliding light-up panels in the back wall of Clachan’s clean-and-boxy principal set open up to reveal the nursery and its shelves and rafters full of flowers, neither mise-en-scene nor stage action pushes as far as it might, either toward manic ecstasy or rock bottom. There’s something particularly depressing about plastic flowers on stage, and the nursery is full of them. Yes, real flowers are expensive and impractical, and supposedly unlucky, but a show like this still wants to find a way to appeal to our senses — it wants to smell a little sickly-sweet and glimmer with the sweat of the hothouse. And when Joe, in a horrible fit of drunkenness, rips the greenhouse apart in search of a bottle that he’s hidden in one of the plant pots, it wants to feel savage — brutally, tragically filthy. We should fear we’ll be hit with flying mud. But though James sways and rages in fine voice, we can also see him throwing all the plant pots carefully upstage to destroy them: The downstage needs to be kept clear for the next scene transition. It’s cool, practical—and undermining.
Especially given the very thing Kirsten admits to craving: danger. And, as both she and Joe stagger towards the desire for recovery (with painfully mixed results), there’s also, perhaps unavoidably, a whiff of broad sentimentality that creeps in. They are both their most thunderous when singing the word “forgiveness†from center stage, arms wide and faces flushed with absolution. Though Guettel and Lucas make attempts to keep things more complex than your average AA meeting, you can only push back so far against the biggest, loudest, most spotlit gesture in your own show.
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.
Days of Wine and Roses is at Studio 54.