Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James soar in ‘Days of Wine and Roses’

May 01, 2023

NEW YORK — Luminous Kelli O’Hara takes just one sip of a brandy Alexander in the magnificently sung stage version of "Days of Wine and Roses," and you can feel her character's inner light begin to dim. O’Hara's witty, bookish Kirsten is a New York secretary who goes on the town one night with a hard-drinking P.R. man played by Brian d’Arcy James. The simultaneous event, though, is her blind date with the devil in the bottle.

Through their superb leading players, composer Adam Guettel and book writer Craig Lucas revisit the classic "The Days of Wine and Roses," a cautionary 1958 teleplay and 1962 film about the wages of booze. The new musical at Atlantic Theater Company — off-Broadway birthplace of "The Band's Visit" and "Kimberly Akimbo" — sets the anguishing consequences of addiction to the rhythms of transgressive escapes and broken hearts.

It's two tortured love stories, actually. One is between O’Hara's Kirsten Arnesen and James's Joe Clay, the other a ménage á alcool — among Kirsten, Joe and anything that's 80 proof. As if to underline the cone of mutual enabling in which Joe and Kirsten live, they’re the only characters in a cast of nine who sing (although their daughter Lila, played by Ella Dane Morgan, gets a few bars in a couple of numbers).

And sing Guettel's opera-adjacent score with all of the glorious technique and intensity that a composer (or director Michael Greif) could possibly ask for. Guettel and O’Hara worked together in 2005 on Lincoln Center Theater's "The Light in the Piazza," and once again, her exceptional coloratura proves irresistible for a Guettel-mixed cocktail of ecstasy and pain. James, a Tony nominee for his recent Broadway stint as the Baker in "Into the Woods," is O’Hara's match for power here, in a part that requires him to be yin to O’Hara's needy yang.

At a time when the American musical seems ever more pumped up on pop, what a pleasure it is to encounter a palette of new show tunes delving deeply into character, that favor sweeping emotionality over Spotify familiarity. Not that Britney Spears isn't fun to listen to — there are now three shows on Broadway ("Moulin Rouge," "& Juliet" and "Once Upon a One More Time") containing songs originally written for her. But the richness of musical theater degrades if bubble gum up-tempo becomes the default beat.

"Days of Wine and Roses" returns us to the middle of the last century, when alcoholism was perhaps more of a hot-button social issue. But its catalyzing role in a co-dependent relationship remains dramatically interesting, especially as charted in Lucas's outstanding book for the show. (Even in an eventual segue into 12-step intervention, Lucas avoids clinical clichés.) What fires up the story is how alcohol migrates from the periphery to the core of Joe and Kirsten's lives, how it becomes both the magnet and the wedge in their marriage.

"Two people stranded at sea, two people stranded are we," they sing in the opening moments of the show, a lyric that identifies pivotal psychological elements in the musical: the alienation Joe and Kirsten both feel, the release from social responsibility they both seek. Drinking is the hobby that becomes the occupation, and Guettel finds a marvelous melodic outlet for their epiphany, in a song O’Hara and James sing together, "Evanescence."

The song soars with their drunken rising spirits, the permission that singing it together gives them to just let go of shame and inhibition. Rarely does a piece of music define so profoundly the benefits of a mood swing engendered by artificial means.

And rarely, either, does a musical commit so generously to the synergy between star-crossed central characters. Besides Lila, the only other complex character is Kirsten's taciturn father, portrayed with an intriguingly enigmatic ache by Byron Jennings. Morgan's Lila is herself a splendidly specific portrait of the daughter of alcoholics, a child who has to learn not only that grown-ups are not reliable, but also that she has to be a parent to them.

Costume designer Dede Ayite does wonders with crisp and prim ’50s silhouettes, and set designer Lizzie Clachan puts the emphasis on scenery portability in her evocation of Joe and Kirsten's liquor-aided downward mobility. Ben Stanton's lighting, too, aids in the sense of a marriage always pitched on the edge of darkness.

James is one of America's best musical-theater actors, a pro with a common touch, not to mention a regal one: he was the original King George III when "Hamilton" was off-Broadway. May his partnership with O’Hara be a long one, in part because this may be O’Hara's best role ever.

Of course, I think that with practically every O’Hara role. Kirsten's descent into dipsomania mandates a performance that at times has to be hard to watch, and O’Hara is not afraid to go there; there's a fine actress to go along with that peerless voice.

It's to James's and O’Hara's credit, though, and Greif's and Guettel's and Lucas's, that downward doesn't mean a downer. Because nothing says hope like a song that illuminates truth.

Days of Wine and Roses, book by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. Directed by Michael Greif. Sets, Lizzie Clachan; costumes, Dede Ayite; lighting, Ben Stanton; sound, Kai Harada; choreography, Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia; music direction, Kimberly Grigsby. With Eddie Cooper, Olivia Hernandez, Sharon Catherine Brown. About 90 minutes. At Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St., New York. atlantictheater.org.