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Lee Remick

Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical

February 7, 2024

Reteaming with O'Hara and book writer Craig Lucas for the first time since the 2005 Tony-award-winning "The Light in the Piazza," Guettel's hodgepodge of a score equates jazz with blithe inebriation and opera with soul-crushing regret, a mostly tiresome juxtaposition that includes the gobsmacking discordance of Kirsten drunkenly bebopping around her apartment while vacuuming it. That O'Hara is never less than luminous, coordinated, and note-perfect during this ill-conceived pas seul fundamentally captures what's wrong with the musical: it's much too beautiful. [more]

Days of Wine and Roses

June 14, 2023

Lucas’ script remains faithful to Miller’s teleplay (with the excision of Joe’s delirium tremens in the psycho ward or his second hospitalization) and much of the dialogue is actually Miller’s. However, the problem is the score. Guettel’s 18 songs (including four reprises) are often atonal, unmelodic, unrhymed and don’t scan. While this is true of the Tony Award-winning "The Light in the Piazza" that score had such a lush sound that it was automatically romantic and appropriate for its story. Here it is almost as though Guettel is striving for opera but without the orchestral underpinnings to make it so. The lyrics are mostly recitative, abstract and metaphorical. Aside from three songs in which Joe or Kirsten are joined by their seven-year-old daughter Lila (played by Ella Dane Morgan), only the couple sing, with O’Hara given seven solos. The real problem is as Stephen Sondheim said about his musical Do I Hear a Waltz?: these are characters that wouldn’t sing so the only way to solve this is to have made "Days of Wine and Roses" an opera with a great deal of orchestral music. Here the songs do not add anything to the story. Like Marvin Hamlisch’s score for the stage version of "Sweet Smell of Success," Guettel’s music is devoid of atmosphere, period or otherwise, unless this is the fault of the orchestrations by Guettel with additional orchestrations by Jamie Lawrence. [more]

A Delicate Balance

November 10, 2022

The first Off Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s " A elicate Balance," his first Pulitzer Prize-winning play (of three), is also the first to feature an all Asian American cast as well as being the first New York production of an Albee play to be performed by a non-white cast. A coproduction of Transport Group and the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), it is has been directed by Jack Cummings III, Transport Group’s artistic director. The production is elegant and polished, if a bit leisurely. However, at two hours and 45 minutes the running time is the same length as the 2014 Broadway revival. The six character cast is led by Mia Katigbak, actor-manager and co-founder of NAATCO. [more]