Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James Reunite for ‘Days of Wine and Roses’

4 years later, Miller would adapt the piece right into a function movie, directed by Blake Edwards (with a beautiful rating by Henry Mancini, his current collaborator on Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. Regardless of the reservations of studio heads, who, in accordance with Lemmon, had been nervous that nobody would wish to see “some downbeat, horrible story about a few younger drunks that may’t recover from it,” Days of Wine and Roses grew to become one of many highest-grossing films of the 12 months, and earned Oscar nominations for each Lemmon and Remick. (In the long run, the film solely got here away with finest tune.) 

Right here is the place Kelli O’Hara enters the image. Rising up in western Oklahoma, the Tony-winning soprano—recognized for her roles in reveals like Good Work If You Can Get It, The Bridges of Madison County, The King and I, and Kiss Me, Kate—was steeped within the films of the Sixties. “That is what we watched full-time in our home,” O’Hara explains. The tales (and the costumes) of that period nonetheless appealed when she began working, and was solid as Susan within the 2002 Broadway manufacturing of Candy Odor of Success, set in mid-century New York. O’Hara was so taken with the world that it conjured—and along with her co-star, Brian d’Arcy James, whom she had seen two years earlier in Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Social gathering—that shortly after Candy Odor of Success closed, and he or she joined the primary workshop of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s The Mild within the Piazza, she pitched Guettel an concept. “I assumed, I wanna do one other present with Brian, and I wished to sing extra Adam Guettel music,” she remembers. “And I mentioned to Adam, ‘It’s best to make a very darkish, opera-type, dramatic musical of Days of Wine and Roses for Brian and for me.”

And so started a prolonged dialog that may culminate, some 21 years later, within the Off-Broadway opening of Days of Wine and Roses at Atlantic Theater Firm on Monday. (Previews started in Might.) Directed by Michael Greif (Expensive Evan Hansen), with music and lyrics by Guettel and a ebook by Lucas—their first collaboration since Piazza, which occurs to be at New York Metropolis Middle later this month for an Encores! presentation led by Ruthie Ann Miles—the present represents a captivating hybrid of types: a 90-minute musical with an operatic rating that confronts the ravages of dependancy with a directness nonetheless not often seen in dwell theater. (Although an altogether completely different undertaking, a 2020-set manufacturing of Lengthy Day’s Journey Into Night time, underlining Mary Tyrone’s opioid dependancy, did arresting work on this house final 12 months.)