Seldom have a pair of alcoholics looked as glamorous as they do in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s bruised romance of a Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James as midcentury-modern Manhattan lovers free-falling all the way to hell, drinks in hand.
And yet we can sense the allure: how alcohol might become the one true thing that matters, smoldering wreckage be damned.
Adapted from JP Miller’s recovery-evangelizing 1958 teleplay and 1962 film of the same name, this “Days of Wine and Roses” is like a jazz opera melded seamlessly with a play.
Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too.
Gone is the emotional aridity that kept the story at a strange remove.
Persons:
Craig Lucas, Adam Guettel’s, ”, Kelli O’Hara, Brian d’Arcy James, doesn’t, Michael Greif’s
Organizations:
Atlantic Theater Company
Locations:
Manhattan