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Soaring Voices and Plastic Plants in Days of Wine and Roses
Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James at peak vocal power.
Mattress is abundantly light and springy, a favorite of junior-high theater programs, while Guettel’s musical rendering of the 1962 film by Blake Edwards (itself based on a teleplay by JP Miller), is a darkly adult affair — though it’s also clearly a labor, and a story, of love. Even when the sliding light-up panels in the back wall of Clachan’s clean-and-boxy principal set open up to reveal the nursery and its shelves and rafters full of flowers, neither mise-en-scene nor stage action pushes as far as it might, either toward manic ecstasy or rock bottom. Of course, there is a perspective from which too much grousing about Days of Wine and Roses feels unkind: Lucas has been sober for 19 years, Guettel went through his own journey to sobriety more recently, and O’Hara has told the story of a woman thanking her after the show and whispering, in parting, “23 years.” If the show—if any show—strikes someone, somewhere, for some reason, to the heart, well, so shines a good deed in a weary world.
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