Turning a Classic Hollywood Film about Alcoholism into an Off-Broadway Musical
Kelli O’Hara as Kirsten and Brian D’Arcy James as Joe in the new musical adaptation of Days of Wine and Roses, based on JP Miller’s 1958 teleplay and 1962 Hollywood screenplay. The Atlantic Theater Company production, with a book by Craig Lucas (CFA’73), is its world premiere. Photo by Aron R. Foster for Atlantic Theater Company
Turning a Classic Hollywood Film about Alcoholism into an Off-Broadway Musical
Playwright Craig Lucas (CFA’73) on creating a new version of Days of Wine and Roses
This article was originally published in Bostonia on June 22, 2023. By John O’Rourke
Excerpt
Playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas has earned a reputation over the past four decades for his ability to skillfully adapt books and films for the stage. He was nominated for a Tony Award for best book of a musical in 2005 for The Light in the Piazza, based on the 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer, and again in 2015 for An American in Paris, based on the popular 1951 film of the same name. He also adapted Jane Smiley’s novella The Age of Grief for the big screen, 2002’s The Secret Lives of Dentists.
“I usually like to adapt things that are broken or flawed,” says Lucas (CFA’73). “When something is broken—even if it’s beloved—if it’s flawed enough, it’s easier to adapt because you can see, oh, we can make that better.” In the case of Piazza, he felt the novella could be enhanced by the addition of music.
But for his latest project—a musical version of the 1962 Blake Edwards film Days of Wine and Roses, written by JP Miller and based on a teleplay by Miller for Playhouse 90 in 1958—Lucas says it’s hard to improve upon Miller’s original scripts, about a young couple’s harrowing descent into alcoholism.
I usually like to adapt things that are broken or flawed. When something is broken—even if it’s beloved—if it’s flawed enough, it’s easier to adapt because you can see, oh, we can make that better.
He was instead drawn to the project, now in its world premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company off-Broadway, because of the chance to work again with his collaborator on Piazza, Tony-winning composer-lyricist Adam Guettel.
“No one in my experience who’s writing songs for the American theater has quite his deep understanding of what drives characters to sing or how music functions in the theater. It’s almost something that exists in him on the cellular level,” Lucas says. “He’s writing chromatic music [where] there is rarely a key signature, and he’s moving within key signatures from bar to bar. That’s someone who’s playing three-way chess: every move has an impact on the game beneath it and the game beneath that.”
Days of Wine and Roses was among the first television and feature films to tackle addiction, a taboo subject at the time. Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it’s the story of a young Korean War veteran and advertising executive, Joe Clay, who meets a secretary, Kirsten Arnesen, and introduces her to social drinking. Before long, the couple, now married and the parents of a daughter, are alcoholics, their lives dangerously out of control. The 1962 film earned Oscar nominations for Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick.
The new musical stars Tony-winner Kelli O’Hara (who starred in Piazza) and Tony-nominee Brian D’Arcy James as the couple besotted with the bottle. It’s won critical raves. The New York Times calls it a “jazzy, aching musical.” The Wrap writes, “Musical theater lightning strikes twice with Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s long-awaited follow-up to The Light in the Piazza.”
Guettel invited Lucas to join the project about 2014. He had started work on the show with another writer, who subsequently left. By the time Lucas arrived, Guettel says, “a few songs were on their way to being written,” but not much more. He and Lucas went off to an artist’s retreat and spent a lot of time talking about the narrative and what they were hoping to achieve in the musical. Lucas not only had the scripts for the original teleplay and the 1962 film to work from, but also a version that JP Miller had adapted for the stage.
In revisiting Days of Wine and Roses,Lucas and Guettel could explore the impact of addiction on a family more deeply than the film or teleplay could. “I think tastes from the late 1950s, early ’60s created certain confines,” Lucas says. “I don’t think people wanted to watch children endangered by alcoholic parents at that time—I don’t think that’s something the audience would have tolerated. But now it’s possible to dramatize for audiences what it means for a child to grow up in a loving home in which there is untreated addiction.”
Atlantic Theater Company’s production of Days of Wine and Roses runs through July 16 at the Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th St., New York, N.Y. Purchase tickets here. View a trailer for the show here.