NEW YORK — Just as New York’s theater world sashays from one end-of-season party to another, bars open at every turn, comes a gorgeously and expressionistically scored new musical from Adam Guettel, an often melancholic composer known as much for the years that flow between his shows as from being Richard Rogers’ immensely talented grandson.
In “Days of Wine and Roses,” Guettel’s seductive arpeggios tinkle and twinkle like ice in a class, only for the composer to follow them with cold, agonizing strings as we watch an otherwise loving marriage get blown up by booze. It’s just as well this off-Broadway staging, directed in typically uncompromising fashion by Michael Greif (”Rent”), is performed without intermission. There would have been no line for the bar, unless you count those looking for water.
Nobody ever intends to become an alcoholic but addiction is insidious.
I’ve long been inescapably attached to Guettel; I listen to his score for “The Light in the Piazza” on an almost weekly basis, finding something new every time. So the first staged performance by the Atlantic Theatre of his much-anticipated score to the new stage adaptation of the stunningly artful 1962 Blake Edwards film, “Days of Wine and Roses,” as adapted from JP Miller’s 1958 teleplay of the same name, would be an occasion for something chilled and celebratory were this not a story of the destructive powers of alcoholism and its unique capacity to first animate, then preserve, and finally torpedo an upper-middle class marriage.
You might think of this piece as the somber underbelly of “Mad Men,” a story of what happens when the go-go music stops. But this was 1962 and it didn’t fully speak to today’s language of addiction. There was blame to be attached to the husband, Joe, played on-screen by Jack Lemmon, who introduces booze to the hitherto non-drinking Kirsten, played by Lee Remick, who sips a sweet cocktail one fateful night and finds she surely enjoys the sensation, even as her remote, stern father watches in dread for something he may have caused.
That pair is now essayed by Brian d’Arcy James, playing a Don Draper insufficiently talented to really be Don Draper, and Kelli O’Hara, playing a young wife who first hopes and then capitulates.
The source movie went against the grain of its day and is rightly lauded for being so prescient. As a musical, it presents a similarly obvious commercial drawback: most urbane social drinkers, aka most New York theatergoers, don’t care so much to see a worst-case scenario. But Guettel and Craig Lucas, who wrote the book, can’t worry about that. Addiction as something tangible is just one of the horrors that potentially await us all. Death, which obsessed Stephen Sondheim, is worse.
At this juncture, “Days of Wine and Roses” has beautiful performances from mature actors (Byron Jennings plays the father), whose exquisite instruments fill the tiny Atlantic theater space. It has a suite of beautiful songs, although it lacks a fully introspective, cumulative ballad for both of its lead characters, the provision of which would be a great improvement.
Some of the lyrics strike me as overly situational, although perhaps inevitably so. Still, we look to Guettel always for the big picture and alcoholism is a wonderful subject for his artistry, given its paradoxical combination of inherited vulnerability and the drinker’s making of lousy choices. Those are the songs that still need to fully arrive although, heaven knows there are glimmers already: “I love a bolted door,” Kirsten sings as both a potential partner and a vulnerable addict. “Let me in there.”
Or from Joe: “There is a man who loves you, as the water loves the stone and the stone adores the hillside where the wind has always blown.”
Book-wise, the show struggles with something tricky for a musical, which is a story that travels on twin tracks. Whose journey are we watching? The husband feeling inestimable guilt for unleashing a demon? Or a wife in present-tense agony, losing her love, her dad, her daughter? The answer, of course, is that it can’t feel like it switches rails (as it now does) but must organically be both, and that kind of coherent double-tracking, that move toward the shared circumstance of a tragic Greek couple, is what needs the most work in Lucas’ book. Right now, Kirsten is underwritten and under-explored, her beautiful songs notwithstanding.
In this musical form, the piece needs to lose more of the noir reality of the film and find more of an overtly theatrical metaphor on Lizzie Clachan’s setting. True emotional engagement only kicks in with the couple’s child, a heart-wrenching section of the piece still in my head as I write. But that feeling of emotional neediness, so constituent a part of the show’s themes, should raise its arms much sooner and more youthfully, I think.
Greif, both an idealist who understands connection and a chilly anti-sentimentalist, is the ideal director and his staging ideas are well on their way. It’s a small cast show and perhaps could be even smaller and deeper, although it could just as well be Broadway scaled. God knows that’s true of these stakes.
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“Days of Wine and Roses” at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, 336 W. 20th St., New York; atlantictheater.org
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