Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Popular culture has stamped the Fifties in our minds with images of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Mickey Mantle and Annette Funicello. The war was over, the economy was booming, bebop and abstract expressionism were bringing new ideas to music and art, and musicals like Guys and Dolls, Bells Are Ringing and The Music Man radiated uptempo optimism.

Of course, there was darker stuff. Racism, McCarthyism, the Cold War, a growing corporate culture that threatened to overwhelm humanistic impulses with statistics and cost-benefit analyses. Much of the darker stuff provided the subject matter of the thousands of mostly live broadcasts of original drama generated by such TV shows as The Philco Playhouse, The United States Steel Hour, Westinghouse Studio One and Playhouse 90.

Kinescopes of dozens of these programs are there to be discovered on YouTube and the further reaches of Amazon Prime. Nobody would claim that all or even most of it was of high quality. Still, there were some real achievements. The TV presentations of some titles were just the first drafts. Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, Patterns, Marty, The Trip to Bountiful, Requiem For a Heavyweight and Twelve Angry Men all premiered in black-and-white square frames, were developed further and became celebrated plays and/or movies. (Many of the originals can be found on YouTube and in a Criterion DVD set called The Golden Age of Television.)

One play that made a particular impact was JP Miller’s Days of Wine and Roses, a script about a young couple whose marriage is threatened by alcoholism written by JP Miller for producer Fred Coe’s Playhouse 90. Originally directed in 1958 by John Frankenheimer and starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie, it became a prestige movie in 1962 starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (both nominated for Oscars), directed by Blake Edwards from an expanded screenplay by Miller.

There were some key changes from TV to film. On TV, much of the story is told in flashback as Joe Clay relates his story to an AA meeting. On film, the story was presented in straight chronology. On TV, Kirsten already enjoys a nip when she meets hard-drinking public relations man Joe at a business party. In the film, Joe introduces her to booze via a brandy Alexander. On TV, the action took place in and near New York City. In the film, the story is relocated to San Francisco.

The new musical version presented at the Atlantic Theater (score by Adam Guettal, book by Craig Lucas and direction by Michael Greif) borrows from both versions. This telling keeps the brandy Alexander scene but returns the story to New York in the Fifties. I think these are wise choices.

The toxic nature of Wall Street, Madison Avenue and other commercial turf in New York had already been explored in Patterns, Executive Suite, and, most notably, The Apartment (which also starred Jack Lemmon). Days of Wine and Roses shifted to the foreground what was mostly in the background in those works, the role that liquor played in the social and business interactions in that world. To function, much less succeed, often required drinking. (Liquor also played a big role in Mad Men, the recent TV series looking at an advertising agency in the Fifties and Sixties.) Alcoholism is now generally recognized as a disease, but having Joe pressure teetotaling Kirsten into becoming a drinking buddy adds to the responsibility he comes to acknowledge regarding his part in her downfall.

Guettal’s score brings to mind another work describing a deteriorating 1950s marriage, Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti. The musical language of both draws on popular music idioms of postwar America, but extends and develops them into writing for classical voices. (For example, Guettal’s song, “Evanesce,” recalls the trio singing about the joys of suburbia in Tahiti.) The combination of bebop jazz coloring and “serious” art song discipline makes Days of Wine and Roses a particular showcase for the vocal and dramatic talents of Kelli O’Hara as Kirsten and Brian d’Arcy James, both giving extraordinary performances.

In any case, I sat in the Atlantic Theater thrilled every minute of the intermissionless piece. I hope that Days of Wine and Roses will be picked up for an extended run elsewhere, but, more than that, I hope an album of the show will be recorded so I can revisit one of the best scores I’ve heard for the theater in a long time.