Ahron R. Foster
The most effective current advertisement against drinking—indeed a stark, brutally cautionary story of alcoholism—is a 95-minute musical. Days of Wine and Roses (Atlantic Theater, to July 16), directed by Michael Greif and based on the play by JP Miller and 1962 film starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, is unusual for so many reasons, not least for being that rare creature, a feel-bad musical (actually, make that a feel-really-really-bad musical).
What also distinguishes it are its Broadway royalty-level, award-garlanded stars, Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James (Tony-nominated this year for Into the Woods), who are more familiar to audiences for playing good or engaging lead characters. Instead, here they play a couple on a relentlessly degrading, depressing, downward spiral. As Kirsten Arnesen and Joe Clay, at least for the first 10 minutes, they represent the kind of sexy partnership who would ordinarily fizz and shine—both are attractive and charming performers—but in Days of Wine and Roses they fall to pieces in front of us, the most toxic of partnerships in free fall.
The book by Craig Lucas, and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, do not try to bring any kind of musical theater levity to the piece; Days of Wine and Roses is a precipitous ski run of addiction and misery, and its raw display of both reverberated among the audience this critic sat among.