But this was 1962 and it didn’t fully speak to today’s language of addiction. There was blame to be attached to the husband, Joe, played on screen by Jack Lemmon, who introduces booze to the hitherto non-drinking Kirsten, played by Lee Remick, who sips a sweet cocktail one fateful night and finds she surely enjoys the sensation, even as her remote, stern father watches in dread for something he may have caused.
The source movie went against the grain of its day and is rightly lauded for being so prescient. As a musical, it presents a similarly obvious commercial drawback: most urbane social drinkers, aka most New York theatergoers, don’t care so much to see a worst-case scenario. But Guettel and Craig Lucas, who wrote the book, can’t worry about that. Addiction as something tangible is just one of the horrors that potentially await us all. Death, which obsessed Stephen Sondheim, is worse.
Some of the lyrics strike me as overly situational, although perhaps inevitably so. Still, we look to Guettel always for the big picture and alcoholism is a wonderful subject for his artistry, given its paradoxical combination of inherited vulnerability and the drinker’s making of lousy choices. Those are the songs that still need to fully arrive although, heaven knows there are glimmers already: “I love a bolted door,” Kirsten sings as both a potential partner and a vulnerable addict.
Book-wise, the show struggles with something tricky for a musical, which is a story that travels on twin tracks.
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