This is not to say “The Days of Wine and Roses” only offers cerebral pleasures. When they first meet, Kirsten looks out over the river and says: “If you look close, it’s filthy I always watch the middle where it’s clean when I’m down here.” Water makes an appearance in the musical (as subject or prop or setting) almost as frequently as booze, provoking enough contemplation of it - how it can envelope you but also isolate and disorient you lift you up or weigh you down how it can clean you up and drown you - to fill up a smart term paper for an English literature class. A bedtime story that Kirsten reads to their child Lila is about Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods, for which Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock “and every night an eagle came and ate his liver” – his liver, the organ most affected by alcoholism. The book by Lucas largely follows the story in the film, although much toned down – there is no scene of Joe in a straightjacket going through delirium tremens in a sanitarium – and with some literate touches. Then forcefully answers her own question:Īnd then lets out a string of nonsense sounds - seh-dle-doo-dle did-dle-doo-dle did-dle-doo… Language has disintegrated, and so has her life. “Are you getting down so low there is nowhere else to go?” In “Are You Blue,” when the joys of alcohol are souring, Kirsten sings a solo: (What are corks used for except for liquor bottles?) ![]() They are simultaneously aware of, and oblivious to, their recklessness. ![]() Joe: I’m riding on an arrow I’m running for my lifeīoth : What’s the worry. Kirsten: I’m leaning out the window I’m running with a knife In “Evanesce,” in the first flush of their romance (with each other and with booze), they sing, accompanied by a soft shoe routine, of how they’re “two corks just bobbing around…in the Long Island Sound.” The jazz is wide-ranging and embodies the arc of the story – from the swinging (and maybe sleazy sounding) jazz that accompanies the joy that Joe and Kirsten take in each other (fueled by alcohol) to Andrews Sister-like harmonies to Brubeck-like cool to a be-bop breakdown. If Joe uses his charm, and alcohol, to win Kirsten over, Guettel employs his own tool of seduction – jazz. So he orders her a Brandy Alexander (which combines crème de cacao with cognac.) ![]() She’s politely cool to him, more amused than bemused. He doesn’t recognize her, but she knows who he is. When Joe first sees Kirsten (O’Hara), he mistakes her for one of these women. “Well, anything for a lift,” Joe says, raising his glass. “They’re waiting to host you,” he tells one of the women. The breathtaking performances by Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara in “The Days of Wine and Roses” are enough justification for this stage adaptation of the sad, dark story about a couple who fall in love with alcohol – originally a 1958 teleplay starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie, then a 1962 film with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick.īut there is also a brilliance that suffuses Adam Guettel’s score, and periodically poke out in Craig Lucas’s book, that make any shortcomings I might see in the show feel irrelevant.īooze is front and center in the story from the get-go, although we might not realize this when we first meet Joe Clay (James), a mid-level public relations executive recently returned from the Korean War, who is on a yacht docked along the East River, greeting women aboard who, we soon understand, have been hired as escorts for Joe’s clients.
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