A SHOW THAT CAN HELP
‘Wine and Roses’ touches on alcoholism & our responsibility to others
It’s a good thing Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s melodious and meticulous musical “The Days of Wine and Roses,” which opened Sunday night at Broadway’s Studio 54 under the skilled direction of Michael Greif, has only one act. There would not be a lot of profit in hiring a bartender for intermission.
That’s because the antagonist in the piece, the destructive third party in the onthe-rocks marriage of Joe Clay (Brian d’Arcy James) and Kirsten Arnesen (Kelli O’Hara), is a guy called Jack Daniel, who sometimes goes by the sobriquets Johnny Walker or Jim Beam and who always makes his mark.
Most dramas about alcoholics follow a personal trajectory, typically a struggling protagonist down the spiral of booze, ending with tentative sobriety and tenuous recovery. But JP Miller, one of the great writers of television’s so-called Golden Age, created a teleplay about the impact of booze on a twosome or, more accurately, a threesome, since Joe and Kirsten have a kid, Lila (Tabitha Lawing), robbed of her childhood by the need to take care of everything herself when someone should have been bringing her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
As a result, “Days of Wine and Roses” explores a more complex dynamic: It is advertising executive Joe, bereft of his parents and still traumatized by service in Korea, who introduces booze at an office party to Kirsten, the daughter of a dour Norwegian father (Byron Jennings, dour indeed), still mourning his wife. All Joe has to do to counter her Scandinavian sobriety is tempt her with a sweet Brandy Alexander. But while it’s Joe who falls first and quickest, he finds the means to recovery, even as the woman he seduced with booze continues her free fall.
And thus the story, which became a 1962 Warner Bros. movie and spawned an Academy Award-winning song recorded by Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams, takes on a broader context: It explores complicity in marriage, as well as how an enabling couple can speed up and justify each other’s self-destruction. And, in Lucas’ book, how a slew of common midcentury American traumas can compound and metastasize, crushing the next generation and maybe explaining some of the many crises in which America now seems to find itself.
My admiration for Guettel’s talent is so great, and my listening to recordings of such prior Guettel shows as “Floyd Collins” and “The Light in the Piazza” so frequent, it almost feels as if I should recuse myself. Suffice to say, his compositional gifts in the current Broadway realm are incomparable.
That said, having now seen this musical (which began at the Atlantic Theater Co.) twice, and wondering at my own slight resistance both times, I think the show needed more songs that offer the kinds of existential inquiry that the subject matter suggests. After all, the Irish poem that gave Miller his title has the stanza: “They are not long, the days of wine and roses; Out of a misty dream our path emerges for a while then closes, within a dream.”
In “Piazza,” that is what Guettel achieved with the title number and songs like “Dividing Day.” In this one, Guettel overly submits to the real-time thrall of plot. To put that another way, Guettel is at his best when expanding a short story like The New Yorker piece that sourced “Piazza.” Musicals based on films invariably confront too much plot, especially one-act musicals. Especially in the last few minutes when movies quicken to resolution but on the stage here you are listening to actor-singers of the caliber of these two masters of the art and all you actually want is emotional revelation. Transferable to yourself.
It’s not like none is offered. The show is sufficiently potent to induce a feeling of dread that’s hard to shake afterward. And there are some Guettel chords here that just viscerally work on the ear and the body, combining as they do with the insidiousness of alcoholism, a disease that often hides in plain sight, especially on and around Broadway, frankly.
The twin lead performances are musically exquisite and courageous to boot. The target audience for this melancholy musical will be Guettel’s many fans as well as admirers of stars willing to head to a tough place with only each other for company. Watching O’Hara in particular is to be drawn as ever to her voice but also to watch her explore self-destruction in a way few of her fans ever will have experienced.
“Days of Wine and Rose” should perhaps have ended up bigger, offering a richer vista of “Mad Men”-like self-obliteration and more opportunity for the choreographers Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia. Or, maybe better yet, smaller, just focusing on a marriage and booze, and a marriage and booze alone.
The show is caught in the middle, but it’s still a beautifully directed, acted, written and composed piece about, yes, alcohol, but also about our responsibility to the very few people in our lives who depend on us absolutely for their own happiness and survival. We all have them. This show might help with that.
Last April, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced a 34-count indictment against Donald Trump, alleging that he intentionally made false bookkeeping entries to cover-up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, intending to violate disclosure requirements of campaign finance laws.
A chorus of criticism greeted the indictments. The Right sneered that Bragg was criminalizing clerical errors. Legal pundits decried the “novel” legal theory on which the indictment was founded. The Left bemoaned that after everything Trump had done, this is the best we can do? Even one of Bragg’s former prosecutors on the case was critical.
Soon after, Special Counsel Jack Smith announced a federal Florida indictment based on Trump’s retention of national defense information. That was followed by another federal indictment, this time in D.C., claiming that Trump used unlawful means in a desperate attempt to cling to the presidency. And that was followed by a sprawling Atlanta racketeering indictment, charging Trump and 18 others with a conspiracy to subvert Georgia election laws. Now that was more like it!
Trump’s March 25, 2024 Manhattan trial date became a calendar entry, wedged in between overlapping trials for far more consequential allegations, and certain to be delayed. Now it appears that the New York trial may actually take place on the appointed date.
What happened? The Florida documents case is bogged down in extensive pretrial proceedings as to what documents, and in what form, will be shared with the defense, the jury, and the public. By contrast, the “discovery” in the New York case — the document owed by the prosecution to the defense — has already been provided, is straightforward, is and not voluminous, and none of it is classified. Indeed, much of it consists of Trump’s own records that were subpoenaed.
The D.C. case, set for trial on March 4, is on pause while a federal appeals court will decide, any day now, whether a president is immune for all actions he undertakes while in office. That ruling will certainly wend its way to the Supreme Court. The New York case, by contrast, addresses only Trump’s conduct prior to his presidency, for which there can be no claim of immunity.
The Georgia case is far too massive to go to trial this year — too many defendants and too many documents. The New York case has but a single defendant — Trump — and the evidence is nicely confined to a narrow set of transactions; checks and bookkeeping entries. It is true that Michael Cohen is an indispensable witness, but prosecutors rely on far more unsavory people to make their case, and his testimony will be corroborated by documents. Outside of Cohen and maybe Stormy Daniels, the New York case will be, well, boring.
In addition, questionable conduct by Fulton County DA Fani Willis is now the subject of legal motions by Trump’s defense. Say what you will about Bragg’s politics, his personal and professional life has been beyond reproach.
The New York indictment has other virtues that have become clearer over time. There are no First Amendment questions as to what speech is permitted and when it crosses the line into an attempt to unlawfully prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Not even Team Trump has argued that he had a constitutional right to cook the books. And this is a New York case under New York law, so Trump cannot pardon himself should he become president.
The legal theory on which the case is based — creating false records with the intent to commit another crime — is not novel. It has been widely used to criminalize fake books designed to mask intended offenses. It is true that the application of these laws has never been used to criminalize attempted campaign finance violations, but that is because most candidates for president keep better books. It is no more novel than arresting a presidential candidate for DWI; it has never happened before but the law is unambiguous.
There is one thing that the New York case has in common with all of the others — even if convicted and sentenced, Trump will not be imprisoned any time soon. There will be a long appeals process for any convictions, and Trump will remain free until that process comes to an end.
The New York case is elegantly simple and well within the understanding of the average juror. It charges a small-time grift, committed in an effort to avoid responsibility for tawdry conduct. A jury verdict of “guilty” will send a clear message that whatever else Trump is, he is a cheap fraud. We all get that.
Kuby is a criminal defense attorney in New York.