| Days of Wine and Roses final performance (spoilers) | |
| Posted by: mikem 05:22 pm EDT 07/19/23 | |
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| Switching gears away from Sondheim and the Shed, I saw the final performance of Days of Wine and Roses on Sunday. Adam Guettel was there although he didn't come on stage and no one made any speeches. I enjoyed it, but I felt that this is one of a few musicals where it seemed like it would be better if it were significantly longer. I have never seen the movie and only knew the barest bones of the plot beforehand. The show feels very episodic, where we are getting little windows into their lives every so often over the years, but it seems like a lot of the crucial moments happen in between those episodes. Kelli O'Hara's character doesn't drink at all, then she has her first drink near the top of the show. Then the scene changes and she's an alcoholic. How did she get from Point A to Point B? And at the end, why is her decision to return to alcohol more final than his prior decision to return to alcohol (which he got past)? They both go through this drink/don't drink/drink/don't drink back-and-forth, but with the exception that I think it's clear when he starts again because she wants him to, I didn't really understand the characters well enough to understand why they are starting and why they are stopping. A lot of the fallout from their drinking (the fire, his losing his job) kind of happens mostly off-stage, or at least enough so that it felt at least to me that a character was telling me that there was fallout rather than me experiencing the consequences along with the characters. I realize an off-Broadway smaller show isn't going to have a real fire, but it didn't feel like a major, major event to me, more like just another episode. The movie is longer than the musical (which has 14 songs and 4 reprises that take up a lot of the length), and I wonder if the characters are better delineated in the movie. The Wikipedia summary of the movie makes the final scene seem much more definitive and much more fleshed out than I felt like it seemed here. That being said, there was a lot to like. O'Hara gave the best acting performance I have ever seen from her, and BDJ and Byron Jennings were both outstanding as always. The scene where he starts drinking again to keep her happy was extremely well done. There is a lot of talent involved in this production, and I hope the creative team can give us more insight into these characters and why they make the decisions that they do. I thought it was interesting that there are 9 actors in the cast, but the songs are exclusively sung by the 3 characters in the central family (O'Hara, BDJ and Ella Dane Morgan, who plays their daughter). Are there other musicals where only a few characters do all the singing, even though the other actors have significant numbers of lines? |
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