‘Days Of Wine And Roses’ Broadway Review: Trying Times For Good Folk In Exemplary Production; Also, A Bouncy ‘Once Upon A Mattress’
deadline.comIt’s easy to feel a bit smug early on in Days of Wine and Roses, as we know so much more – or at least have so much greater vocabularies – when it comes to things like toxic relationships and the role of abstinence in maintaining sobriety and all the other tenets of Bill W that have passed into common parlance and popular culture since Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick starred in the 1962 feature film version.
Would the musical’s lovestruck alcoholics Kirstin Arnensen (Kelli O’Hara) and Joe Clay (Brian D’Arcy James) stood readier for battle if they’d seen so much as a single episode of Celebrity Rehab?
Whatever misguided self-satisfaction we initially cling to fades fast as this cast, its director Michael Grief, book writer Craig Lucas and composer/lyricist Adam Guettel draw us into their jazzy world of Brandy Alexanders, martini lunches – what Loudon Wainwright III once described as “drinks before dinner and wine with dinner and after-dinner drinks.” We’re barely into the hour and 45 minute running time before we’ve begun to see life through the blurry, hazy lens of a couple we’ve come to know well.
Chalk it up to theatrical arts of the first order – acting, direction, book and Guettel’s mesmerizing operatic bebop – that we’re soon hand-in-shaky hand with characters who haven’t a clue how to break the cycle of whiskey-ice-repeat.
Read more on deadline.com