Singing Drunks: Days of Wine and Roses

Brian d'Arcy James and Kelli O'Hara in Days of Wine and Roses. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

At first Days of Wine and Roses, written by JP Miller, was a ninety-minute drama on Playhouse 90 in 1958, at the height of the era of live TV drama, starring Cliff Robertson as a corporate drunk and Piper Laurie as the woman he falls in love with and turns into a fellow alcoholic. The tragedy is that while he finally gives up the bottle and gets his life together, she can’t stop – she winds up choosing booze over both him and their little girl. At this point not many viewers remember the original, which is distinguished by Laurie’s complexly delicate performance. (You can watch it on Prime.) But the 1962 movie, directed by Blake Edwards, is justly famous, for the performances of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as the couple, Joe and Kirsten Clay, and Charles Bickford, repeating his role as Kirsten’s rough-hewn Swedish papa, is quite fine. The narrative is a conventional addict story but its unadorned quality lends it a certain authenticity, and Lemmon isn’t as showy as he is in other dramatic roles; he may be responding to Remick, an underappreciated actress whose modesty is one of her virtues.

In the new stage musical, adapted by Craig Lucas with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, which just closed on Broadway (it premiered at the Atlantic Stage Company last spring), Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara played the sodden Clays, and it’s hard to imagine two actor-singers who could have been more effective in the parts. James gets Joe’s hail-fellow-well-met affability but with an understated desperation that’s there from the opening party scene, where, as head of public relations at the agency where he and Kirsten both work, he’s expected to supply not just liquor but also women for clients; there’s a subtle suggestion that he imbibes not just to have fun but so he doesn’t have to think too much about the seedier side of his job. Drinking loosens him up but when, in the early days after their daughter Lila (Tabitha Lawing) is born, Kirsten eases off and he feels he’s lost his playmate, it can also make him angry. He explodes in the scene – famous in Lemmon’s version in the film – where, when he’s convinced her to cheat after a domestic near-disaster has kept them sober for a couple of months, he can’t locate a bottle he’s hidden in her father’s greenhouse. Partly because as an actor James has a sweetness and gentleness, his fury in this sequence, which takes in the boss who fired him for drink-fueled irresponsibility, is surprising and upsetting.

Something Old, Something New: The King and I & Something Rotten!

Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara in The King and I, at the Lincoln Center. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The first five or ten minutes of Bartlett Sher’s new production of The King and I are spectacular. The ship carrying Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara) and her son Louis (Jake Lucas) to Siam, where she has been contracted to teach the royal children, glides across the stage of the Vivian Beaumont (at Lincoln Center), then makes a slow right-angled turn and moves toward the audience, shrouded in steam, while representatives of the court march down the aisles to meet it. The thirty-piece orchestra underneath the thrust renders the Richard Rodgers music with the robustness that can only be nostalgic for New York theatregoers who are middle-aged or older. And you feel blanketed by the sumptuousness of Michael Yeargan’s sets, Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Donald Holder’s lighting. Seeing the show at a Wednesday matinee late in previews, I thought to myself, “Is it possible that Sher is going to make me care about The King and I the way he made me care about South Pacific?” (His South Pacific, which opened at the Beaumont in 2008, is the best production of a musical I’ve ever seen.)

I Could Go On Singing: Giant and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

Brian D’Arcy James and Kate Baldwin in Giant at the Public Theater in New York (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

Considering that Show Boat is one of the most phenomenally successful musicals in history, it’s surprising that it’s taken nearly a century for someone to get around to adapting another Edna Ferber novel to the musical stage. Like Show Boat, Giant, which she wrote in 1952, is a vivid soap opera that sprawls across two generations. Ferber has been out of fashion for a long time (though her books are still highly readable); most people who are familiar with the material would know it through the famous 1956 movie version, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and, in a posthumous performance, James Dean. The giant of the title is Texas, where Jordan “Bick” Benedict (Hudson) brings his Virginia bride Leslie (Taylor) to live on his enormous ranch, Reata: he has to get used to her independent-mindedness and her social conscience and she has to get used to the ways of Texas, which is crass, self-adoring, patriarchal and racist.

The movie, which runs on for three hours and twenty minutes, is uneven in every conceivable way: visually, in the storytelling and in the acting. Stevens was past his prime when he made it; he’d begun to equate length and subject matter with prestige, in that distinctly Hollywood way. (Giant has approximately the same running time as a double bill of his two best pictures, Alice Adams and the Astaire-Rogers classic Swing Time, both of which he made in the mid-thirties.) Still, like the book on which it’s based, Giant is very absorbing, and even though it’s a mammoth Oscar-boosting extravaganza, it doesn’t try very hard to convince you that it’s an important drama. By contrast, the musical, which began at the Dallas Theater Center and made it to New York’s Public Theater last month, is more inflated than the loudest-crowing, most self-righteous Texan in its cast of characters. Moreover, it’s something that you could never call a single one of those Texans: it’s a twenty-four-carat phony.

Spotlight: The Virtues of Craftsmanship

Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight.

This review contains spoilers for Spotlight.

The writer-director Tom McCarthy takes a leap into the big time with Spotlight, his extraordinary chronicle of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team breaking the story of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in early 2002. (Their reporting won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for journalism.) McCarthy’s first two pictures, The Station Agent (starring Peter Dinklage) and The Visitor (starring Richard Jenkins), are poignant, small-scale dramas that share a theme: the protagonist is a man who has absented himself from the world and, by chance, gets pulled back in. Both are beautifully drawn – perfect short-story movies – and beautifully acted. What’s amazing about Spotlight is that McCarthy, working in collaboration with Josh Singer, a one-time staff writer on The West Wing who most recently penned the script for The Fifth Estate, is able to apply the same focus and the same skills for working with actors to such density of material. The filmmakers’ approach, a combination of intimacy and specificity, approximates the thorough, step-by-step process by which a team of four journalists – Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), who report directly to the paper’s assistant managing editor in charge of investigations, Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery) – set on by the Globe’s newly hired editor-in-chief, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), uncover a story of thundering resonance and breathtaking immensity. The movie has breadth and depth; a newspaper picture that flies in the face of the idea that we’re in the twilight of the newspaper business and a social-problem drama that never for a moment slips into melodrama, it is, I think, a classic.

West Side Story: Rumble in the Rubble

David Alvarez Ariana DeBose in West Side Story (2021).

The enthusiasm over Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, the street-gang retelling of Romeo and Juliet that opened on Broadway in 1957 and was first filmed by Robert Wise in 1961, reminds me of the outpouring of praise that greets Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel every time it generates another Broadway revival. Just imagine, runs the usual buzz, someone wrote this serious, important musical back in the dark ages when musicals were frivolous! How modern, how prescient! How daring to kill off the protagonist, to incorporate domestic abuse, to put disaffected youth on the stage! How fresh it still seems, how up-to-the-minute! Well, I see no reason to condescend to lighthearted musicals, especially when they come equipped with scores by Kern, the Gershwins, Porter, Berlin and Rodgers and Hart. But the truth is that the American musical took its first resounding step past frivolity when Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote Show Boat, with its tragic racial subplot, exactly three decades before West Side Story. And that’s a good musical. 

New on Broadway: Eureka Day, Death Becomes Her and Swept Away

From left: Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Eureka Day premiered in a production by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company half a dozen years ago, and it’s finally arrived on Broadway via off-Broadway (in 2019) and London (in 2022). Written by Jonathan Spector and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, it’s a sensationally funny satire of contemporary woke communities – about the impossibility of reaching consensus among progressive people who are trying painfully hard to maintain, or at least convey, sensitivity to each other’s viewpoints when reality seems to have deliquesced into a bog of ferociously held competing opinions. The characters we meet are five members of the board of a private Berkeley elementary school called Eureka Day School who find they have to meet a crisis: a mumps epidemic that divides the parents, some of whom believe in traditional medical practices and some of whom resolutely do not. The school’s middle-aged director is Don, who has a gentle manner and almost bottomless patience but whose demeanor, as Bill Irwin plays him, suggests that his desperation to keep an even keel and indicate respect toward all the other voices in the room has been eating away at him. (He’s like one of Christopher Durang’s befuddled heroes, but without the repressed anger that flares up suddenly every now and then.) Eli (Thomas Middleditch) is a tech billionaire and young father whose generosity has funded the struggling school’s various initiatives, like an all-gender washroom. Eli’s son and the daughter of another board member, Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), are good friends, and their play dates enable the adults to engage in extramarital games of their own; though Eli claims that he and his wife have an open relationship, it turns out that either he’s misrepresented the situation to Meiko or else he and his wife don’t necessarily agree on the rules. The latest addition to the group is Carina (Amber Gray), a Black woman whose perspective, according to the longest-running member, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), is particularly welcome. Suzanne articulates that view euphemistically, but it comes across as presumptuous and condescending – especially since Carina, like the others, comes from a comfortable middle-class background. But Suzanne is a genius at spurious apologies that sound perfectly sincere, so the colleagues who find her putting words in their mouths tend to trip over themselves when they call her out on it, or come across as more brusque than they’d intended.

Two Macbeths

The Manchester Theatre Festival production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth comes in at an hour and three-quarters without intermission; it moves like lightning. The show, which was broadcast worldwide in the National Theatre Live series and will make a New York appearance in the spring at the Park Avenue Armory, was staged by Kenneth Branagh and American director-choreographer Rob Ashford (who was responsible for the recent Broadway revivals of Promises, Promises and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), and it has a glamorous duo at its center: Branagh and Alex Kingston, the English actress known to North American audiences for her work in the TV series ER. They make a charismatic couple and a sensuous one, and the setting, a deconsecrated church with an earthen floor, a candlelit altar at one end, and the audience seated in pews along two sides, tennis court style, gives the evening a rough-hewn medieval bigness and an experiential excitement even on the screen. That’s especially true in the vividly staged fight scenes (Branagh and Ashford have added the battle at the beginning of the narrative that is only reported in Shakespeare’s text) and whenever the Witches (Charlie Cameron, Laura Elsworthy and Anjana Vasan) are hovering. You can’t always make out what they’re supposed to be enacting or even what they’re saying, but they’re effective in a primal, horror-movie way, and when they appear in the smoky archways of this church or when doorways close on them so they look like they’re disappearing into the side of a building, they’re genuinely creepy. And the scene where Macbeth returns to find them to conjure emanations of his future and the future of Scotland, first oozing out from under a sheet as if they were being birthed by a monster, is close to terrifying. (Branagh and Ashford’s inspiration here seems to be David Cronenberg.)