It could easily have turned into a screwball comedy if it wasn’t for the unlimited drinking. look at them Kirsten, a blonde beauty with a forgiving smile and a quick counterattack. Joe, her curly hair is cute, but she’s too arrogant to understand that she has to go out of her way to win over this woman.
Shortly after the two met in New York City in 1950, he began singing sweetly. He sang presumptuous romantic chatter about the two of them together under the Chapel of the Stars. There she teases him and brings him back to Earth.
“Wow,” she says. “Who are you wooing? It can’t be me. You don’t know me.”
This is a classic in the addiction canon.”days of wine and roses”, so some of you may already know. JP Miller’s terrifyingly candid words 1958 TV dramastarring Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson, Miller’s somewhat bruised production 1962 film adaptationStarring Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, Kirsten and Joe are a compelling pair who go hand-in-hand to their tragic self-destruction through alcohol.
In Craig Lucas and Adam Goettel’s jazzy, heartbreaking musical based on the TV show and film, Kelly O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James play the irresistibly charming Kirsten and Joe, with O’Hara exquisitely voiced. She sings 14 of the 18 songs on the program. 7 of them are solos. Presented in its world premiere by Michael Greif for the Atlantic Theater Company, “Days of Wine and Roses” fills the old Gothic Revival parish house of the Linda Gross Theater with stunning acoustics.
“Marooned at Sea,” Kirsten and Joe sing understated and hauntingly in a short, perfect prologue. “It’s the two of us who are stuck.”
that’s right. However, when they first met at a party on a yacht on the East River, Kirsten was a non-drinker and had no interest in alcohol at all, but Joe decided that she was his drinking buddy. I decided that she would be extravagant because I could. Her taciturn father (the wonderfully brusque Byron Jennings) will always believe that he will corrupt her that she has acquiesced to her and has since been so corrupt.
“Get rid of him, Kirs,” he tells her, but it’s already too late. Anyway, what really needs to be weeded out is the sea of booze in their relationship.
Lucas and Guettel, who shared the same mid-century era with great success in the 2005 Broadway musical The Light in the Piazza, which also starred O’Hara, each talk about their personal struggles with substance abuse in the past. speaking publicly. It removes the heavy-handedness of previous versions of Days of Wine and Roses, softens the details of Joe’s depravity, and delves deeper into the heartbreaking family aftermath of addiction.
Sometimes Lucas (the book) and Guettel (music and lyrics) speculate on the audience’s familiarity with the plot, or veer too far away from melodrama to something emotionally dry. But they also unmistakably capture the bliss that Kirsten and Joe feel in a bubble threesome. Just the two of them and the alcohol will hold an endless private party.
Henry Mancini’s soaring strings for the film’s music aren’t for those high-spirited enthusiasts. In the cocktail-mixed song “Evanesce” Guettel gives them bright, fast, frenetic and danceable music. There’s a playful carelessness to the sandpaper percussion when you soft-shoe a bit with salt spilled on the floor. (Choreography by Sergio Trujillo and Carla Puno García.) For Kirsten and Joe, sobriety is an unthinkable exhilaration, even if life falls apart.
Amazingly, they do that even though they love each other and their very capable daughter Laila (Ella Dane Morgan). Lyra learns her stuff from an early age and learns to tell her lies to protect her parents. In the end, it’s Joe, who finds the strength to choose children over alcohol, and Kirsten, who clings to her private life and feels abandoned by her husband.
Kirsten, equally influential as O’Hara, is less detailed than Joe. Joe’s backstory is that he is a veteran who has just returned from the Korean War. (The battle flashbacks Joe goes through when he’s drunk feel superfluous.)
Kirsten has no such context at all, and as a result looks oddly modern, which makes the show feel unrooted despite its heyday of ’50s design. . (Sets by Lizzy Krachan, costumes by Dede Aite.) Kirsten recognizes the pervasive sexism of her time—she bluntly refers to the very few female senators. However, this drama doesn’t necessarily look like that. (Warning: Contains spoilers.)
There is no sense of censure like the alcoholic woman of the 1950s, much less the blaming of a woman who has left a child behind, or a married woman who slept with strangers on a bender. There is no sense of harsh judgment that would be. Or how any of that contributes to Kirsten’s own self-loathing.
Yet “Days of Wine and Roses” is full of sympathy for her alcoholism.
“Don’t give up on me,” Kirsten wrote to her daughter. She may have meant it when she added, “I’ll be home soon.”
days of wine and roses
Until July 16th at the Linda Gross Theater in Manhattan. Atlantic Theater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
