GUETTEL RETURNS: 'DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES' & 'THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA'

Adam Guettel is back, but you now have less than one week to catch him. His recently premiered new musical, Days of Wine and Roses, will soon conclude its limited engagement at the Atlantic Theater Company, off Broadway, on July 16. I wish it were moving to Broadway, but no. If there are tickets to be had, pursue one now.

I will pause here for my standard disclaimer: I have, over the years, become friends with Adam Guettel, after covering him early on for the New York Times. This friendship, however, does not intrude upon (or influence) my fundamental belief that he is, still, the most gifted musical theater composer of his generation. Adam’s music for theater sings to me as no other theater music that I’ve heard from a living composer in my lifetime (the now late-Mr. Sondheim included, which is not to say, “better,” just wonderfully singular). It is music that touches my heart and my head through a musical alchemy that I can’t fully explain. You hear it, you feel it, you know it.

It is also extraordinarily sophisticated music compositionally. Adam is a risk-taking, wildly original composer in infinite ways that only multiply the beauty of his music.

So much for my technical analysis. His lyric writing craft is also powerfully impactful, poetic yet virtually translucent, rarely drawing attention to itself, asking questions that only his music can fully answer.

Adam has been absent from the musical theater scene for too long (though he and I do grab a drink together now and then). Days of Wine and Roses — derived from a 1950s teleplay and the subsequent 1960s Blake Edwards movie that famously starred Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick — is a piece he has been working on for a very long time. The whims of Broadway producers, the tastes of Broadway audiences, the pandemic and, of course, Adam’s own perfectionist habits have conspired to keep it far from a theater. Until now, finally.

It is no lark. The love story of two destined-to-be-raging alcoholics who meet cute, fall hard and then very nearly take each other down, the show is unflinching.  There is no happy ending. All of this is heartbreakingly captured in Adam’s score, grounded in a 1950s “Cool Jazz” palette that is a refreshing new framework for him musically. Within its contours, though, the signature Guettel melodicism-dipped-in-dissonance is omnipresent. Most importantly, for me, his ever-yearning quest for unexpected release and resolution in his melodies, a quest that takes him into the harmonic stratosphere and lends his songs such profound, other-worldly beauty, is undiminished.

You’ve just gotta hear it.

Days of Wine and Roses stars two of musical theater’s greatest artists: Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James. They nail their husband and wife roles as you would expect them to, acting with a fierceness that you might not have suspected of them; Ms. O’Hara particularly. Vocally, Adam has challenged them beyond all measure, writing music that pushes to the limit every facet of their respective instruments. The result is singing from each that exceeds anything I’ve ever heard them do, especially a stunning extended passage that propels Mr. d’Arcy James into his falsetto voice for many minutes at a time. It is a breathtaking, high wire, tour de force and, as always, with Adam’s music, the perfect accelerant to the dramatic moment.

This has been a surprisingly great stretch to again hear Adam Guettel in a theater. Just weeks ago, Encores! at City Center, revived his masterpiece, The Light in the Piazza, and did it proud. The musical, to my mind, is one of the most beautiful musical theater creations of our time. It won Tonys in 2005 for Adam’s orchestrations (shared with two other orchestrators, Ted Sperling and Bruce Coughlin) and for his score. Both were shimmeringly displayed in this excellent Encores! production, eloquently conducted by Rob Bowman, and smashingly sung by Ruthie Ann Miles, as the shepherding mother, Margaret, and by 19-year-old Anna Zavelson (in an incandescent, star-making performance) as Clara, the daughter Margaret shepherds through the tourist sites of Florence on her way to a romantic epiphany with an enchanting young Florentine named Fabrizio, divinely inhabited here by James D. Gish.

As I wrote in my book, EVER AFTER: Forty Years of Musical Theater and Beyond, The Light in the Piazza simply remains one of the finest works of musical theater that I have ever seen. This time around, it was gone in a week. Soon Days of Wine and Roses will be gone too. Thankfully, Adam Guettel is still here, and writing. Let’s celebrate this happy fact. It is major news.