LUSH LIFE

“Days of Wine and Roses” and The Animal Kingdom.”

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

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.