Drunk in Love

Adam Guettel's musical is too quick to clean up its spills.

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THE ENCORES! REVIVAL of Mary Rodgers's Once Upon a Mattress and the Broadway premiere of her son Adam Guettel's Days of Wine and Roses makes for a whiplash-inducing double feature.

Mattress is abundantly light and springy, while Guettel's musical rendering of the 1962 film by Blake Edwards (itself based on a teleplay by J.P. Miller) is a darkly adult affair-though it's also clearly a labor, and a story, of love. Actress and singer Kelli O'Hara floated the idea of adapting Edwards's film to Guettel 20 years ago, when they were at work on The Light in the Piazza, a show that would put them in the bright lights, O'Hara with a first-time Tony nomination and Guettel a win for Best Original Score. O'Hara knew she wanted to work with Brian d'Arcy James on the project; Guettel recruited his Piazza collaborator Craig Lucas to write the book. Now, two decades on-and after an Off Broadway run at the Atlantic-the show is palpably personal.

"It is a partnership like no other that I've had," James told the New York Times, while O'Hara said, "I've never been so passionate about anything in my life." Those are some big superlatives, but they feel fair: Days of Wine and Roses was built for O'Hara and James, both of whom are at the peak of their artistry. O'Hara sings all but four of the play's songs, and her voice is the kind of instrument that sends people scrabbling for metaphors. It's a prism, an alpine stream, a Golden Snitch-clear, shimmering, endlessly agile and controlled. She sings like Ginger Rogers dances. James's suave, deceptively mutable baritone is a beautiful complement for her. He's playing a PR man of the Mad Men era and persuasion, and his voice fits the part. Sometimes it's all pleasant surface. Other times, we're let in: It gets high and vulnerable, gains a nasty edge, or-as when he sings the show's imploring central ballad, "As the Water Loves the Stone, to O'Hara-it goes soft and gentle enough to support a newborn's head.