“To have this recognition at the end of that journey is really quite astounding and rewarding and humbling,” reflects Brian d’Arcy James on his Tony Award nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses,” a musical he has been involved in the development of for over 20 years. His co-star Kelli O’Hara brought the idea of musicalizing the famous 1962 film to composer Adam Guettel and had him in mind to star from the very beginning. To see the show evolve from the moment he and she worked together on the musical “Sweet Smell of Success” in 2002 to now has been “a long and really beautiful journey,” and the nomination feels like a signal that it “was all a noble effort.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
James starred as Joe Clay, a public relations executive with a penchant for alcohol who strikes up a relationship with a colleague, Kirsten Arnesen (O’Hara), introduces her to drinking, and thus sets off a devastating series of events as the pair struggle with addition while starting a family. The five-time Tony nominee believes Joe Clay may be the most challenging role he has ever taken on in the theatre in part “because of the nature of the character and the complexity of the issue,” not to mention how both characters “succumb to their diseases and combat it and find hope and solid ground.” The material proved technically demanding, too, as the performer shares that Guettel’s music was “just as tricky and challenging for me as a singer and pushed me in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever been challenged, perhaps maybe with Sondheim.”
The Tony-winning Guettel crafted the score for O’Hara and James’ voices specifically. The actor calls it “quite an honor” to have a show written with his strengths and abilities in mind. He commends the composer – who won Tony Awards for his score and orchestrations for “The Light in the Piazza” and earned a nomination for original score for “Wine and Roses” – for his “ability to write specifically and exclusively for the world in which the drama is taking place.” He also relished “the mystery” of how he and librettist Craig Lucas would adapt the film into a musical, comparing the experience of watching the creative process unfold to “watching a present being unwrapped.”
James opened the musical with the number “Magic Time,” set at a corporate event where Joe has been imbibing and where he first becomes acquainted with Kirsten. The performer thinks Joe is immediately drawn to her because “she has a spine and she has a point of view and she is not shy about showing everyone, as well as Joe, what the parameters are of what she expects and what she hopes for.” That opening number and the ones that immediately follow also depict the “ineffable layer of what happens when two people fall in love.” As structured by Guettel and Lucas, it also depicts “two people who are capable, who have tons of potential and charisma and have sharp wit” before addiction “cuts them down in a couple of ways.”
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James also performed one of the most unforgettable numbers in the show, “435.” Named after a code Joe has concocted to remember where he hid a bottle of whiskey in a greenhouse – fourth section, third row, fifth pot – it depicts Joe’s descent into a rampage as he struggles to find the booze and curses those who have turned their backs on him. The Tony nominee delivers an acting and vocal tour de force, one that took time for the actor to figure out how to approach in order to perform it successfully eight shows a week. “Creating that number was painstaking in a way, in the sense that you always had to know where you were in terms of the levels of rage and regret and self-shame and self-spiraling and self-hatred,” reveals the actor. The song also incorporates Joe’s suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder. Since this scene is “the nadir” of Joe’s addiction, the actor says playing it allowed him to have “the abandon and the allowance to let go and not care about how I looked or how I felt or even how I sounded,” which was “a very liberating thing that I’ve never experienced before.”
Though “Days of Wine and Roses” is full of Guettel’s Tony-nominated music, it also allows space for Lucas’ book scenes, including a particularly devastating one in which Joe finds Kirsten on a bender in a motel room. James says it was “very unique” to have a book scene as complex as this one in a musical. “Watching Kelli and doing the dance in that scene with Kelli and knowing how deep the needs were to meet our addiction, to satisfying the craving of the addict but also to satisfy the goal of these two people who love each other and want to be with each other – those are two incredibly powerful things that are happening at the same time,” explains the actor. He says he was “gobsmacked” by his scene-partner’s performance in that scene and says the playing of it together was “something I doubt will ever be matched in terms of my experiences on stage.”