It's hard to know-or maybe, really, to admit that you drink too much. After all, you might just be a fun guy. The sort who orders half the menu at a dinner for two, using each cocktail or glass of wine as a kind of musical notation, a mark of rest between courses, helping the unhurried night grow long and lively.
Three drinks in, or four, neon signs blur with companionate charm, and the lights dotting bridges (you see them from the back of your car as you head to the next party) spread calmly over the water, offering you peace.
Drink might help you speak up, speed your charisma. It might lift a scrim and put you in better contact with others, and with your own senses. Seamus Heaney once wrote:
When I unscrewed it I smelled the disturbed tart stillness of a bush rising through the pantry.
When I poured it it had a cutting edge and flamed like Betelgeuse.
If that bright flame makes you too wild now and then, makes you wake up with a tart taste in your mouth, having forgotten how you ended up in bed, and you start to measure hangovers in weeks instead of mornings... who can say? You might've just had a bad month. You've been looking for light.
One such fun-loving innocent is Joe Clay (Brian d'Arcy James), the rascal whose penchant for drink is the igniting spark of "Days of Wine and Roses," a new musical at Studio 54, directed by Michael Greif-based on the play by J. P. Miller from 1958 and the Blake Edwards film from 1962-with a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. We first meet Joe at a work event in nineteen-fifties New York, a glass of amber liquid in hand, chatting up his boss's pretty, new secretary, Kirsten Arnesen (Kelli O'Hara).
Joe's a Korean War veteran, recently back Stateside. Kirsten's the daughter of a taciturn Norwegian. She grew up on a farm; her wit is city-ready.
This story is from the February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
STUNTED
\"The Fall Guy.\"
MOTHERS OF US ALL
Paula Vogel's \"Mother Play,\" Shaina Taub's \"Suffs,\" and Amy Herzog's \"Mary Jane.\"
PURE PLEASURE
The \"Radical Optimism\" of Dua Lipa.
PARADISE LOST
The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud's new novel.
ORIGIN STORY
What do we hope to learn from our prehistory?
DEATH IN VENICE
At the Biennale, the past dignifies the weird, desperate present.
WE'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I
\"You'll never get away with this!\" Ultra Man vowed as he wriggled in his chains. \"You may destroy me, but you'll never destroy what I stand for!\"
STONES OF CONTENTION
The British Museum faces accusations of cultural theft-and actual theft.
A CAMPUS IN CRISIS
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
ARROW RETRIEVER
I am an arrow retriever. After a batrows are costly and time-consuming to make. It seems like a terrible waste-and maybe even a sin―for an arrow to fall to the ground without hitting someone. Even if the arrow kills somebody, it can be reused to kill someone else. As Randolf the Scot famously said, \"Arrows don't grow on trees.\"