Lush Life: Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James on the Beauty and Chaos of ‘Days of Wine and Roses’

Four years later, Miller would adapt the piece into a feature film, directed by Blake Edwards (with a gorgeous score by Henry Mancini, his recent collaborator on Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. Despite the reservations of studio heads, who, according to Lemmon, were worried that no one would want to see “some downbeat, terrible story about a couple of young drunks that can’t get over it,” Days of Wine and Roses became one of the highest-grossing movies of the year, and earned Oscar nominations for both Lemmon and Remick. (In the end, the movie only came away with best song.) 

Here is where Kelli O’Hara enters the picture. Growing up in western Oklahoma, the Tony-winning soprano—known for her roles in shows like Nice Work If You Can Get It, The Bridges of Madison County, The King and I, and Kiss Me, Kate—was steeped in the movies of the 1960s. “This is what we watched full-time in our house,” O’Hara explains. The stories (and the costumes) of that era still appealed when she started working, and was cast as Susan in the 2002 Broadway production of Sweet Smell of Success, set in mid-century New York. O’Hara was so taken with the world that it conjured—and with her co-star, Brian d’Arcy James, whom she had seen two years earlier in Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party—that shortly after Sweet Smell of Success closed, and she joined the first workshop of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s The Light in the Piazza, she pitched Guettel an idea. “I thought, I wanna do another show with Brian, and I wanted to sing more Adam Guettel music,” she recalls. “And I said to Adam, ‘You should make a really dark, opera-type, dramatic musical of Days of Wine and Roses for Brian and for me.”

And so began a lengthy conversation that will culminate, some 21 years later, in the Off-Broadway opening of Days of Wine and Roses at Atlantic Theater Company on Monday. (Previews began in May.) Directed by Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen), with music and lyrics by Guettel and a book by Lucas—their first collaboration since Piazza, which happens to be at New York City Center later this month for an Encores! presentation led by Ruthie Ann Miles—the show represents a fascinating hybrid of forms: a 90-minute musical with an operatic score that confronts the ravages of addiction with a directness still rarely seen in live theater. (Though an altogether different project, a 2020-set production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, underlining Mary Tyrone’s opioid addiction, did arresting work in this space last year.)