We take a look at what is being said about the musical adaptation of Blake Edwards’s 1962 film, starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James.
New York Theatre Guide.com: **** “While Days certainly doesn’t go down easy, it’s energizing to see a Broadway show, including director Michael Greif, handle a mature theme like alcoholism with precision and compassion. Cheers to that.”
The Guardian: **** “Director Michael Greif’s production is shot through with heartache and hangovers, and worth all the squirming in your seat.”
The New York Times: “What’s astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.”
Time Out.com: **** “Days of Wine and Roses reunites composer Adam Guettel with playwright Craig Lucas; as in their previous collaboration, 2005’s The Light in the Piazza, the result is ambitious, artful and musically sophisticated. But whereas Piazza delivers a sweeping romantic breadth of Florentine airs, this piece is more intimate and interior in scope, at times claustrophobic.”
ExeuntNYC.com: “While much of the musical treatment seems somewhat at odds with the serious story there are moments of charm and levity. A delightful duet between Lila and Kirsten as they write letters to each other may be the only song in any musical that details an outbreak of lice. Much is also made of Kirsten’s Norwegian heritage with a song based around the phrase “Sammen I Himmelen” – together in heaven.”
Deadline.com: “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.”
New York Post: *** “O’Hara, d’Arcy James and director Michael Greif have deftly put on a domestic, behind-closed-doors musical without any cheesy Lifetime Original sap. (This production is not so emotionally loud, unlike another Greif-ical, “Next to Normal.”) It’s simply staged — albeit in too big of a theater — and appropriately distressing.”
Entertainment Weekly: “As a result, the success of Days of Wine and Roses hinges heavily upon the two actors playing Joe and Kirsten to not only sell their giddy highball highs of their heart-fluttering early romance, but also seamlessly plunge into the emotional waters of their deepest and darkest lows. O’Hara and James rise to the challenge tenfold, pairing perfectly with one another onstage with their incredible chemistry and treating book writer Craig Lucas’ powerful material with the nuance and gravity that it rightfully deserves.”
New York Stage Review: **** “Talk about running the acting gamut A-to-Z-and-back! Watch and listen to O’Hara in early sequences, intelligent, charming. Watch her in Dede Ayite’s astute costumes become increasingly dependent and careless as Kirsten decides she enjoys matching Joe shot for shot. Watch her when Kirsten retreats to a motel room where she wants only to guzzle and entreats Joe, sober thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous support, to join her. Watch her futile last attempt to return home, still hopelessly dependent on the sauce, still insisting she can’t face life without it.”
NewYorkTheater.me: “The two stars carry “Days of Wine and Roses,” their exquisite voices bringing out the brilliance of Adam Guettel’s jazz-inflected, often operatic score, and investing the characters’ rocky emotional journeys with a credibility that few other performers could match. They justify bringing to Broadway an adaptation of a story that feels dated.”
Theatrely.com: “Working from Miller’s text, the adaptation smooths out downward paths (Joe is now a Korean War vet; a flashback in one scene telegraphing what a detailed characterization could do much more elegantly) but grants them Guettel’s gorgeous, alternately swooning and jazzy score, along which to soar and descend. O’Hara and d’Arcy James sound particularly heavenly taking their turns on two solos they both get cracks at, “Forgiveness” and the haunting “There Go I.””
Days of Wine and Roses continues to play until the 28th April.