Michael Phillips: In ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ composer Adam Guettel took on the challenge of putting alcoholism to music
Does addiction have a sound?
Popular culture and several of the world’s greatest jazz musicians, from Charlie Parker to Bill Evans and back, say yes. It does. Many, in fact.
Film composers have dramatized all kinds of notions, rarely great or truthful but certainly dramatic, about what a life-threatening bender might sound like for full orchestra. In Miklós Rózsa’s heavy-breathing, Oscar-nominated score for “The Lost Weekend” (1945), Ray Milland drinks his way into oblivion accompanied by strings, brass, reeds and the then-alarming novelty of the electronic and otherworldly theremin.
A decade later, “The Man with the Golden Arm” — the Hollywood take on Nelson Algren’s tale of the heroin-addicted gambler Frankie Machine, played by Frank Sinatra — turned the title character’s chemical highs and lows over to Elmer Bernstein’s blasts of what might called “danger jazz.”
Then in 1958, television’s prestigious “Playhouse 90” series introduced a different, more claustrophobic portrait in addiction with “Days of Wine and Roses.” The JP Miller drama, directed by John Frankenheimer, told of a three-way love affair between a public relations executive (Cliff Robertson), the company secretary (Piper Laurie) who joins him in a downward spiral, and whatever they’re drinking that night.
This was harsh stuff, even within its hopeful framing device of the Robertson character, Joe Clay, sobered up and sharing his life story at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It’s very hard to find online today, though for now the Internet Archive has a streamable copy.
When “Days of Wine and Roses” went Hollywood, in the feature film sense, the music took over and practically drowned the 1962 adaptation directed by Blake Edwards, with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in the leads. For millions of a certain age, just reading or saying the title leads directly to humming the Henry Mancini love theme from the 1962 movie. That theme will never die. Even if it’s not telling the truth about its own story.
Now we have the latest iteration of that story, which has been transformed into an unlikely, singular and heartbreaking stage musical currently in its Broadway premiere production. To be clear, “Days of Wine and Roses” is not going for size or spectacle. Its emotional fullness, however, feels enormous thanks to music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, a book by Craig Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss”) and sublime turns from Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James under Michael Grief’s direction.
I wanted to know how Guettel, now 59, went about dramatizing and bringing together these two lonely souls, even as the story tears them apart. Guettel’s own struggles with addiction found their way into the process, through the characters.
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Adam, we had breakfast 20 years ago near the Goodman, in an incredibly-smoke filled diner, and I remember it being too much to handle even for, as you put it, someone who used to smoke “like a ridiculous cancer-loving fool.” Remember?
A: Yes! Those were the days. I remember when tech rehearsals were full of smoking. And flirting. And now you can’t do either.
Q: Every love story has an obstacle. The obstacle with “Days of Wine and Roses” is addiction. And every love story need somewhere to start and somewhere to go. Early in the show, I love how your song “Evanesce” embodies the reckless abandon of Joe and Kirsten before things get frightening.
A: That boppy, splintery ’50s jazz (in “Evanesce”) feels like what should happen, and how the characters behave, at that point in the story. It’s an improvisatory flight for them, a projection of their future together. The style of that song, when they’re reeling off Charlie Parker (vocal) lines — I mean, not as good as Parker’s, but that’s the idea — seemed right for a duet of how they’re feeling when they’re drinking, right then and there. And as the story progresses, my inclination was to go into the subtext, the psychological undercurrents or concurrents, with songs like “Are You Blue?” where Kirsten is suppressing what isn’t working in her life. It’s denial energy. And the song that succeeds that one, “Underdeath,” in her admitting to herself and to her daughter and to the audience how badly she has screwed up her life.
Q: May I ask about your own history and challenges with addiction?
A: Sure.
Q: Was “Days of Wine and Roses” difficult to write? Or cathartic? I imagine it brought up memories, maybe some useful ones.
A: You know, at times it was cathartic and painful (laughs). Revisiting a time in my life that was out of control. But I also knew that my intimacy with that self-destructive behavior was giving lots of ideas and insights I was grateful to have. Which sounds crazy, but there it is. So it mostly felt like a tailwind for me.
Q: We’ve all seen enough phony or clueless depictions of addiction on stage, in the movies, on TV —
A: Absolutely. That was a third rail for us. Also we decided not to mention AA by name (a big component of the original “Playhouse 90” version), and we wanted to make the character of Joe’s AA sponsor a real foil, not just a treacly sort of emblem of AA.
Music, I hope, can help add some psychological layering for these characters. And some insight, if we’re lucky. To try to turn everything these two people go through, through the music, felt like a decent use of my time as a dramatist.
We always knew we had to keep the show small, just based on the nature of the story itself. And if it was going to be produce-able, it had to be cheaply produce-able. In terms of great singers, we only needed two. And now, as the show goes out in the world, the bet I’m placing is that it’ll get picked up and championed by really great singer-actors who want to take it on for what it is: a steeplechase.
I don’t go out of my way to write complicated music. Some people would accuse me of that, and it’s a fair accusation. But one of my challenges to myself now is to choose some topics that insist on simplicity, and a different kind of melodic writing.
Q: Years ago, after your Tony Award-winning success with “The Light in the Piazza,” you wrote several songs for a musical based on “The Princess Bride,” is that right? That sounds like the sort of simplicity challenge you’re talking about.
A: Ten songs, actually. Right. They’re propulsive, melodic — it’s up to the audience to say if they’re catchy.
Q: You and the “Princess Bride” author and screenwriter William Goldman came to an impasse on the project?
A: He wouldn’t sign a traditional collaboration agreement and insisted on a different kind of deal, which I felt I couldn’t do, not just for monetary reasons but for the example it would set for future collaborations. So. The project fell apart at that point. But the songs are mine, and we’ll see.
Q: “Days of Wine and Roses” is a pretty unlikely property to have remained in the public eye this long. Watching the “Playhouse 90” version for the first time, I was surprised to learn it begins with Joe and Kirsten in a shared bubble of hard drinking. In the 1962 movie, and in your musical, Kirsten starts out a nondrinker.
A: Craig (Lucas) felt very strongly about that. And in all the versions she ends up not being able to recover, and he ends up pulling it together. The unfairness of that, in the cosmic sense, to me felt stronger, and more writable.
If something’s a period piece, I’m not a fan of inserting or insisting on contemporary attitudes or mores about what it means to be a woman, a wife, a man, a drunk, wealthy, down on your luck — whatever it is. (During rehearsals) questions did come up with Craig, Michael (Grief, the director) and Kelli about how we delineate Kirsten as an intelligent and in many ways a strong character, but without any modern-day thinking. I think we succeeded. (There were ideas about) Kirsten wanting to run her own business with Joe, or having ambitions along those lines, which would feel entirely natural to us today. But in the 1950s, less so.
To make an alloy of our time and the time in which the story’s taking place — that ultimately weakens the show. I want the audience to be ensconced in the story, to live entirely within that story. In any period piece we can identify with the characters if the story’s told well. If we identify, we’re engaged. And if we’re engaged, we remember and take it home with us, like silver in our pocket.
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“Days of Wine and Roses” continues through April 28 at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., New York; daysofwineandrosesbroadway.com.
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(Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.)
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