Theatre in Review: Days of Wine and Roses (Atlantic Theater Company) They've watered down the wine in this well-intentioned but strangely stilted musical about the ravages of boozing. Blake Edwards' 1962 film, written by JP Miller (based on his Playhouse 90 teleplay), remains an astonishingly frank and ugly account of a marriage destroyed by alcoholism, not least for the unsparing performances of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. As sometimes happens, however, the process of transforming such sharp-edged material into musical theatre hasn't added anything new or essential. Seeing it the other day at the Atlantic, I kept wondering why anyone thought Days of Wine and Roses needed to be a musical at all. Craig Lucas' book follows the road map of Miller's screenplay, which tracks the marriage and downward spiral of PR executive Joe Clay and Kirsten Arnesen, a secretary in Joe's firm. He is a heavy drinker who introduces her, a teetotaler, to the joys of Brandy Alexanders. She is seduced and their mutual infatuation with the bottle proves to be their undoing. A few years later, his career is on the skids and her day drinking has gotten so bad that, dropping a cigarette while in a stupor, she nearly burns down their apartment house. Barely surviving a bout of alcohol poisoning, Joe, knowing rock bottom when he sees it, Joe turns to Alcoholics Anonymous. But Kirsten can't, or won't, join him on the road to sobriety -- "The world looks so dirty to me when I'm not drinking," she laments, poignantly -- leading to a terrible reckoning. The show's creators have wisely opted for a chamber musical format, keeping the focus almost entirely on Joe and Kirsten, but they have also removed key elements, a choice that proves to be damaging. The film -- which, in its early reels, comes off as a variation on Billy Wilder's The Apartment -- takes pains to show how Joe and Kirsten are shaped by their toxic work environment, he procuring women for his clients and she putting up with her handsy boss. (If the opening shot, panning across a smoky, crowded cocktail bar, doesn't establish the characters' seedy milieu, hang on for the next sequence, in which Joe delivers a covey of fur-wrapped blondes to a private yacht.) All of this is dealt with in a few lines of dialogue, a choice that robs the story of gritty specificity and blands out the characters. The musical also skips over Joe's two harrowing stays in mental institutions and the moment when, facing a roomful of AA members, he admits his alcoholism. The book does introduce a new element, suggesting that Joe is haunted by his Korean War experience, but it is too vaguely articulated to be effective. At their best, Adam Guettel's songs pack emotional depth charges under cool, cerebral surfaces, a style that was perfect for The Light in the Piazza, about a lonely, proper Southern matron adrift in a foreign culture, facing the loss of her intellectually disabled daughter. Writing in a similar style here, Guettel's soaring, meticulously wrought melodies feel oddly disconnected from the self-destructive characters and their increasingly sordid circumstances. Unfailingly elegant, with lyrics that traffic in graceful metaphor -- Kirsten sings of her mother, "It was if she was made of linen/You were afraid she would rip" -- they nevertheless feel like attractive glazing applied on a scratched, rough-hewn surface. Even with their many elisions, the book scenes are far more dramatic and incisive than anything in the score. That the songs can nevertheless send a thrill through the audience is attributable to Brian d'Arcy James and Kelli O'Hara, both in superb voice. James, a longtime expert at portraying sweaty, desperate characters, makes something shattering out of "435," in which Joe furiously destroys his father-in-law's greenhouse while searching for a secret stash of hooch. (It's one moment -- ugly, profane, and vital -- when the score feels entirely on point.) O'Hara excavates several layers of meaning in "First Breath," sung by Kirsten during a period of rest and reflection between benders; she also livens things up with a kicky little jazz number titled "Are You Blue?" If the stars often seem to constitute the entire show, Byron Jennings is a looming, mournful presence as Kirsten's emotionally withholding father. (The sight of him staring, silently but brimming with emotion, at Joe and Kirstin locked in an embrace, is one of the show's most resonant moments.) David Jennings is solid as Joe's no-nonsense AA sponsor. Ella Dane Morgan has a couple of striking moments as Joe and Kirsten's daughter, who, early on, learns about the perils of relying on unstable adults. Lizzie Clachan's set design, with its sliding, LED-illuminated panels, initially does nothing to suggest the show's 1950 time frame, but some of the later interiors are rather better. Dede Ayite's costumes and David Brian Brown's hair design both feel closer to the film's slightly later period but are suitable for the characters. Ben Stanton's skillful lighting is generally understated; he also creates some lovely uplighting effects using the small pool of water located downstage on the set. Kai Harada's sound design is thoroughly transparent and intelligible. Director Michael Greif does fine work with his stars, who are unfailingly thoughtful throughout, but he can't keep Days of Wine and Roses from feeling predictable, a case history with a predestined conclusion. (Interestingly, this notably light-on-dance musical required the services of two choreographers: Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia.) The musical wants us to feel for the characters without making them sufficiently compelling; it never fully engages with the tangle of passion, dependency, and addiction that brings Joe and Kirsten to such a terrible place. There well may be an effective way of dramatizing this story, but Lucas and Guettel haven't found it. --David Barbour 
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