The Topsy-Turvy Logic of Drinking, in “Days of Wine and Roses”

It’s hard to know—or maybe, really, to admit—that you drink too much. After all, you might just be a fun guy. The sort who orders half the menu at a dinner for two, using each cocktail or glass of wine as a kind of musical notation, a mark of rest between courses, helping the unhurried night grow long and lively. Three drinks in, or four, neon signs blur with companionate charm, and the lights dotting bridges (you see them from the back of your car as you head to the next party) spread calmly over the water, offering you peace.

Drink might help you speak up, speed your charisma. It might lift a scrim and put you in better contact with others, and with your own senses. Seamus Heaney once wrote:

When I unscrewed itI smelled the disturbedtart stillness of a bushrising through the pantry.

When I poured itit had a cutting edgeand flamedlike Betelgeuse.

If that bright flame makes you too wild now and then, makes you wake up with a tart taste in your mouth, having forgotten how you ended up in bed, and you start to measure hangovers in weeks instead of mornings . . . who can say? You might’ve just had a bad month. You’ve been looking for light.

One such fun-loving innocent is Joe Clay (Brian d’Arcy James), the rascal whose penchant for drink is the igniting spark of “Days of Wine and Roses,” a new musical at Studio 54, directed by Michael Greif—based on the play by J. P. Miller from 1958 and the Blake Edwards film from 1962—with a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. We first meet Joe at a work event in nineteen-fifties New York, a glass of amber liquid in hand, chatting up his boss’s pretty, new secretary, Kirsten Arnesen (Kelli O’Hara). Joe’s a Korean War veteran, recently back Stateside. Kirsten’s the daughter of a taciturn Norwegian. She grew up on a farm; her wit is city-ready.

It’s easy to see what part alcohol plays in Joe’s life. It spurs on his charmer’s flirty patter and makes him bold when the moment’s ripe for risk. From the start, Joe—pure personality—is fixated on wooing Kirsten. Early on, she lets slip that she doesn’t drink. He seems to take it as a challenge. Soon we see them at dinner. He feeds her a sweet drink, and she doesn’t hate it as much as she thought she would. The buzz is nice. A horror story begins.

Guettel’s music sets a tipsy, disorienting mood. The show—a tale of two drunks and their dangerous passage through the years—stays emotionally plausible because it never allows itself to burst into anthemic songs that could be plucked out of context and placed on the pop charts. Instead, O’Hara and James sing tilting lines of chromatic melody. Here, music is a way of communicating the topsy-turvy logic of a long night and its sloppy seductions. Drunkenness has a whole sensorium of its own: just from the sound—and the smooth, swaying conducting of the show’s music director, Kimberly Grigsby, visible on a perch stage right—you can almost smell the air of certain rooms, sour with booze and smoke.

When Joe and Kirsten are at their most happily plastered, flying high over their worries and the widening chasm of their shared problem, they indulge in a cheerful ditty. They’re shuffling among drinks, pulling spirit after spirit out of bags, singing a pure-hearted ode to champagne, with its “little evanescent bubbles erasing everything!” It’s all about the narrowing enclosure of a relationship circumscribed by addiction—the type of giddy love that starts to slide downward as soon as it hits its crest:

Two dolphins breakin’ a waveTwo dolphins right to the grave . . .Sometimes I feel like I am riding on an arrowOn the needle of a compassSpinning counterclockwiseJust a gust of airWith all this water everywhereI’m leaning out the windowI’m running with a knifeI’m riding on an arrowI’m running for my lifeWhat’s the worryI have you nowYou are all I need

It’s a happy, seasick song that accentuates the strong voices of both singers. While they woozily harmonize and belt, they dance. Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia have choreographed evocative, efficient, droll numbers that call to mind old show-biz glamour, and also the dark-edged phrase “high functioning”—how a pair of really fizzy drunks can look and feel great while spinning ever closer to the brink.

But this kind of fun never lasts. The night slumps, a short life becomes a half-conscious montage, ice waters down your drink and you order another too quickly on its heels. Joe and Kirsten have a baby, and their unfitness for their new roles as parents becomes immediately apparent.

The show is best—and the whole thing is quite good—when it demonstrates how alcohol, trickily liquid, can fill the spaces in a relationship, helping to bring it together but also inevitably driving it apart. That great time starts to stink if you can’t stop going back to the well. Soon it’s time to look around and start over.

One of the subtler touches of the lighting in “Days of Wine and Roses” is how it eventually gives the audience a sense of the daytime, once Joe gets sober and acquires an A.A. sponsor (played by a warm-spirited David Jennings). Most of Joe and Kirsten’s story unfolds at night, that dark cloak for excess, but drying up lets a bit of sunshine in. So does having someone to talk to outside the household. Broaden your circle and brighten up a tad. “The Animal Kingdom,” a new play by Ruby Thomas, at the Connelly Theatre, directed by Jack Serio, takes place entirely within a group-therapy setting, showing how talk can be a balm, even if only for a while.

Sam (Uly Schlesinger), a troubled college student, fresh off an attempt at taking his own life, is now living at a rehab institution. He’s smart, intense, and full of nervous energy. His counsellor, Daniel (Calvin Leon Smith), provides a counterpoint to Sam’s obvious physical discomfort: Daniel is snappily dressed, in a brown-orange sweater and matching socks, his loafers giving off a slight shine; he’s warm where Sam is defensively cool, ever more patient when Sam seems about to snap. They’re in a room with a two-way mirror—the only room in this willfully claustrophobic play.

The story unfolds in the course of six mandated sessions with Sam’s family. His talkative mother (Tasha Lawrence), his vault-tight father (David Cromer), and his nervously nice younger sister (Lily McInerny, in a nuanced, moving performance) take turns trading impressions and feelings, offering something of a biography of Sam and hinting at the family dynamics—current and generational—that might have brought them all to this sorrowful crux. It’s hard to keep a play like this from becoming too schmaltzy or too gratuitous a spectacle of trauma and pain, but Thomas’s agile, empathetic writing maintains a balance.

Sam is queer and congenitally sad, but he’s privileged, too, and he knows it. One of the problems itching at his brain is his family’s money. His dad, sprung from humble beginnings, leads corporate takeovers, raiding companies for spare, sellable parts. His sensitive, anti-capitalist son wants some distance from all that activity, even though it has paid for his education, and for his time in this facility. Perhaps his highest privilege in this moment is Daniel’s presence. Smith plays him with a velvet toughness that reaches past the stage and into the audience; his performance is a marvel of clarity, and a kind of love. His note-perfect friendliness is a reminder that beyond war and boredom, anxiety and sorrow—whatever might drive you to drink or self-harm—are human voices, our true intoxicants, harder to access but easier to hold on to for good, always waiting to step in and soothe. ♦