O’Hara, Kelli

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    Daniel Radcliffe, Pete Townshend and Sarah Paulson Party for the Tonys

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    The actress Kara Young stood surrounded by admirers inside David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center around 1 a.m. on Monday morning, fielding a swarm of well-wishers after winning her first Tony Award, for featured actress in the comedy “Purlie Victorious.” Her older brother hovered close by and periodically fanned out the train of her lime chiffon dress.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the 39-year-old playwright who penned the night’s best play revival, the searing family drama “Appropriate” — and a fellow first-time Tony winner — was next in line to compliment Ms. Young and her gown from the designer Bibhu Mohapatra.“This is a forever iconic Tonys look,” Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins told the actress. “When we’re like 70 years old, they’re going to show you in this.”The performers Kecia Lewis and Camille A. Brown.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe actresses Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesBranden Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe performers Shaina Taub and Matt Gehring.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was a flash forward on a night when, for many of the Tony Award winners, anything seemed possible. All eight of the acting honorees, across plays and musicals, earned their first-ever Tony wins on Sunday — some for their first major Broadway role or their first nomination, others after four decades in the theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘The Hours’ Returns to the Met Opera With Its Stars

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      Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato reprised their roles in Kevin Puts’s adaptation of the award-winning novel and film.Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera last season and returned for its first revival on Sunday, is even prettier than I remember.In the often exquisite score, the strings throb and the woodwinds flutter. When Puts reaches for percussion instruments, he chooses the sweeter ones — glockenspiel, crotales, chimes, vibraphone — and combines them luxuriously. Woodwinds at the top of Act II are practically Wagnerian in their extravagant stateliness. Tender piano chords toll lonesomely. Musical surges are thick with nostalgia. The luscious vocal lines revel in love, and understanding, of the human voice.But it’s easy to miss the score’s manifold beauties when the stage is full of distractions. Extraneous dancers and supernumeraries flood Phelim McDermott’s production at the Met. In one moment, the choreographer Annie-B Parson has them twirl around holding pillows while a character considers killing herself in a hotel room. Adding to the busyness, Puts heavily features the chorus as a collective, omniscient narrator and the characters’ inner voices. As a device, it doesn’t work; while the story intimately intertwines the emotional lives of three women, the chorus infringes upon their connection with the audience.It’s almost as though Puts and McDermott are afraid to take a sustained look at their heroines, or that they don’t trust the audience’s attention span. This is especially perplexing considering they have three leads on the order of Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato, who reprised their roles on Sunday. When the stage was free of clutter, their star wattage was dazzling.As Virginia Woolf, DiDonato was a haunted, magisterial presence. Her voice, dark, fulsome and cutting, communicated Woolf’s intellectual depth and her personal demons; there was the insight and occlusion of a novelist at the height of her powers hiding her suicidal ideations from others. As Laura, O’Hara sang with a voice of fine crystal, and while her timbre was a little cloudier than it used to be, she embodied Laura’s fragile nerves and anxious self-loathing. The overall shape of Fleming’s voice remained improbably youthful in its creamy roundness. Her Clarissa was patrician yet superficial, though partial blame rests with the libretto, in which every other word of hers is “flowers” or “party.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

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      O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Review: Romance on the Rocks

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are superb as a midcentury-modern couple free-falling into addiction in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical.Seldom have a pair of alcoholics looked as glamorous as they do in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s bruised romance of a Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James as midcentury-modern Manhattan lovers free-falling all the way to hell, drinks in hand.What’s astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.For all the glossy come-hither of Michael Greif’s tone-perfect production, which opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, not for an instant does it glamorize the boozing itself. And yet we can sense the allure: how alcohol might become the one true thing that matters, smoldering wreckage be damned.Adapted from JP Miller’s recovery-evangelizing 1958 teleplay and 1962 film of the same name, this “Days of Wine and Roses” is like a jazz opera melded seamlessly with a play. Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too. Gone is the emotional aridity that kept the story at a strange remove.Granted, the opening scene is still perplexing, too sparely written and staged to situate the audience properly, or let us grasp the skin-crawling 1950s creepiness of what James’s Joe Clay is up to on a yacht in the East River. A public relations guy, Joe has arranged a corporate party onboard, and procured female guests for the pleasure of the male executives.So there is a certain rancidness to his mistaking O’Hara’s Kirsten Arnesen — the impeccable secretary to the boss at the firm where they both work — for one of the women in his Rolodex. Not exactly a meet-cute, even if she does set him straight, puncturing his condescension with a tight, nice-girl smile pasted to her face.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      How ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Became Their Passion Project

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brain d’Arcy James didn’t let the door close on their new Broadway musical about a couple undone by addiction.As origin stories go, the transformation of “Days of Wine and Roses” from a movie into a musical is a straight shot, with a twist. Kelli O’Hara and Adam Guettel had the inkling more than 20 years ago, when she was a Broadway ingénue, working on what became her breakthrough Tony-nominated role in “Light in the Piazza.” Guettel had written the music and lyrics for that musical, which went on to earn him a Tony Award for best score. They talked through their coordinating vision for evolving “Wine and Roses,” the midcentury classic of a romance ruined by addiction. “I think I used the words ‘a weird dark opera,’” O’Hara recalled.She already had a co-star in mind: Brian d’Arcy James, debonair and wry, like Jack Lemmon was in the 1962 movie, opposite the O’Hara look-alike Lee Remick. The film memorably traced the stuttery arc of alcoholism and recovery, a trajectory now familiar — onscreen and off — but rarely put to song.Guettel was not only game to try, he eventually brought in the playwright Craig Lucas, the Tony-nominated book writer for “Light in the Piazza.” Both had, separately, been facing their own addictions, in ways that informed, and sometimes overlapped with, the show’s development.The twist, then, is that, two decades on, the musical about a whiskey-soaked couple has actually arrived on Broadway — it opens on Sunday — starring O’Hara and James, now in the prime of their careers, with gorgeously matched vocals. The production takes pains to show the love that propels their characters’ relationship — however misguided it turns out to be.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Musical to Open on Broadway This Winter

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James will reprise the roles they played Off Broadway earlier this year.“Days of Wine and Roses,” a musical adaptation of a midcentury story about a loving marriage destroyed by alcoholism, will come to Broadway early next year starring the acclaimed stage performers Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James.The production had a 10-week run earlier this year at the Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes called it a “jazzy, aching musical,” and praised its “glorious sound.”O’Hara is a seven-time Tony Award nominee who won the award in 2015 for her performance in a revival of “The King and I.” James is a four-time nominee, most recently for last season’s revival of “Into the Woods.”The Broadway production, directed by Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”), is scheduled to begin previews Jan. 6 and to open Jan. 28 at Studio 54 for a 16-week run. The lead producers are Kevin McCollum, Mark Cortale, Lorenzo Thione and Joey Monda.“Days of Wine and Roses” began its life as a teleplay in 1958; it was then adapted into a film in 1962. The musical features a score by Adam Guettel and a book by Craig Lucas; they previously collaborated on the 2005 musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and both of them have spoken about their own struggles with substance abuse.Guettel said he’s not sure when he first encountered the film, but that it immediately resonated. “I was really streaming tears at that point,” he said. “I had a sense of how alcohol and drugs had affected my life, and even though I had escaped the clutches of all that, the vivid recognition of it really spurred me on, not to create some sort of cautionary tale, but to depict how being addicted affects your life and the people around you.”The musical, like many, has had a long and bumpy road to Broadway. Guettel said he first discussed the idea with O’Hara two decades ago, when the two were working on “The Light in the Piazza,” and that he had developed the score for her.“It seemed like the right role for her, even then, in terms of the tenderness and the strength,” he said.James joined the project in the earliest days as well; he and O’Hara are friends who performed together in “Sweet Smell of Success.”There have been others who have come and gone — at one point, John Logan was the writer; at one point, Scott Rudin was the producer; at one point, Lincoln Center Theater was going to stage the show.“The fact that it is coming through the steeplechase intact is incredible,” Guettel said. More

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      Inside the 2023 Tony Awards After-Parties

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      Spirited celebrations that included a block party in Washington Heights and a gathering at the Carlyle Hotel extended past 4 a.m.It wasn’t hard to spot J. Harrison Ghee at the official Tony Awards after-party outside the United Palace theater in Washington Heights on Sunday night — they towered over much of the crowd in a vibrant blue gown, with a statuette in hand and a trail of well-wishers close behind. After their groundbreaking win for best leading actor in a musical — they became the first out nonbinary performer to win in the category — the gown color, it seemed, was fortuitous.“I felt like this is such a Cinderella moment,” they said.Hundreds of the ceremony’s attendees spilled out, shortly after 11 p.m., almost directly into the party: a tented extension of the fuchsia carpet and its lush floral backdrop, with catering that reflected both the culinary traditions of the neighborhood’s surrounding communities (paella, ceviche, mango on sticks) and also the immediate hunger of nominees who had sat snackless for hours. (About 800 hamburgers from Shake Shack were gone within 90 minutes.)Suzan-Lori Parks, left, with LaChanze at the after-party near the United Palace theater. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesThe Tonys, which celebrate Broadway’s best plays and musicals, were held uptown for the first time this year at the United Palace — an ornate movie house at 176th Street in Washington Heights, nearly eight miles north of Times Square. The theater is tucked within the largely Dominican neighborhood where Lin-Manuel Miranda shot the 2021 film adaptation of his musical “In the Heights.”“To show off one of the cultural gems of the city to a national audience is super exciting,” Heather Hitchens, the president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing, which puts on the Tonys with the Broadway League, said in an interview on Saturday.“The after-party is always important, but to celebrate that we made it through a season and we gave some awards out and actually had a telecast?” she said, continuing, “We haven’t been able to do that for so long.”Sunday’s ceremony was certainly an unusual one. With the Writers Guild of America still on strike, the show featured unscripted commentary from presenters, abundant musical performances from the year’s productions — plus Lea Michele’s rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from last season’s “Funny Girl” — and a wordless opening dance number by Ariana DeBose, the show’s host.Kelli O’Hara, a presenter at the Tonys, at the party in Washington Heights. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAbout 800 hamburgers from Shake Shack disappeared within 90 minutes at the after-party outside the United Palace.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesBowls of Frosted Flakes were scattered around the official after-party. Tony the Tiger attended the Tonys this year.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“Ariana DeBose,” Wayne Brady, who is set to star in the 2024 Broadway revival of “The Wiz,” said later in the evening, shaking his head. “She was tremendous. She can improvise like no one’s business.”“It went so smoothly,” said Bonnie Milligan, a Tony Award winner for best featured actress in a musical for her performance as a scheming aunt in the offbeat musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” which was the top winner of the night with five trophies overall. “So many people were able to speak in solidarity with the strike.”With a long list of celebrations still ahead, many of the night’s winners and nominees stayed at the official after-party only briefly before moving on to smaller soirees hosted by individual productions across the city.Myles Frost, last year’s winner for best leading actor in a musical for playing Michael Jackson in “MJ,” at the official after-party. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesJulia Lester, a nominee for her turn as Little Red Riding Hood in the revival of “Into the Woods,” was leaving with her father as many attendees were still arriving. Ms. Lester said she was “just seeing where the night takes me.” She wore a voluminous green ball gown, sheer elbow-length gloves, a black choker and a bow in her red curly hair. “I’m wearing a hoop skirt, so I can’t do that much. Sitting down was a nightmare.”Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, donned a sparkling scarlet outfit meant to elicit, he said, “Big Red Riding Hood.” His after-party plans, he added, would extend “until the hood falls off, which is literally impossible. It’s pinned, glued, sewn — I probably won’t be able to take it off to go to sleep.”The event at the Carlyle Hotel, hosted by the theater publicist Rick Miramontez and the producer John Gore, picked up after midnight. Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesBy 12:30 a.m., many had left the official after-party, and most of the nominees began heading to the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side, where the theater publicist Rick Miramontez — dressed in a white blazer with red-and-white striped shorts — was hosting his famed late-night shindig for several hundred guests with the producer John Gore.“This is the party,” Mr. Brady proclaimed from a couch nestled alongside an open bar near the hotel’s entrance.Kolton Krouse, who starred in a recent revival of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” and uses the pronouns they and them, also opted for business-on-top-party-on-the-bottom, sporting a black blazer that barely covered their torso atop gold heels.Bonnie Milligan, left, who won the Tony for best featured actress in a musical, and Miriam Silverman, who won for best featured actress in a play, at the Carlyle Hotel.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesVictoria Clark, who won the Tony for best leading actress in a musical for her role in “Kimberly Akimbo,” at the Carlyle party.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesJessica Chastain, with her grandmother Marilyn Herst, whom the actress said she brings to “all the parties.”Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times“Congratulations!” they said, lunging to stop Jessica Chastain, who was wearing a caped, sunshine-yellow Gucci gown, her long red hair in a high ponytail, as she swept in around 12:30 a.m. — accompanied by her grandmother, Marilyn Herst.“I bring her with me to all the parties,” said Ms. Chastain, who was nominated for best leading actress in a play for her performance as the housewife Nora Helmer in Jamie Lloyd’s bare-bones revival of “A Doll’s House.”The English actress Jodie Comer had won the category for her performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault in the one-woman show “Prima Facie,” but you would not know it by Ms. Chastain’s cadre of photographers, who temporarily clogged the passageway between the upper lounge and a bar area, and a receiving line of those congratulating the actress after the play’s final performance this past weekend.“I hope it’s not over forever,” Ms. Chastain said as shutters clicked away.Alex Newell, left, and J. Harrison Ghee at the Carlyle, hours after becoming two of the first out nonbinary performers to win a Tony Award.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesJordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, at the Carlyle. His after-party plans would extend “until the hood falls off,” he said.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesBuckets of Moet & Chandon champagne were placed around the room, while waiters in white blazers ferried silver trays of sliders and cartons of French fries around four rooms. On side tables sat slender trays of nuts and chips, which nominees appreciatively munched.In a back room alongside a bar, a cabaret singer crooned Frank Sinatra’s “Nice ‘n’ Easy” accompanied by a pianist and a cellist. (The Tony-winning soprano Kelli O’Hara, in a feathery white gown, bopped to the music.)Julia Lester, a nominee for “Into the Woods,” arriving at the Carlyle party, hoop skirt and all.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesBen Platt and Micaela Diamond, the stars of “Parade,” at the Carlyle.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesZachary Prince, left, with Brandon Uranowitz, who won a Tony for best featured actor in a play for his role in “Leopoldstadt.”Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesThe party began to pick up around 1 a.m. Ben Platt, accompanied by his fiancé, Noah Galvin, in a matching black suit, got a hug from Micaela Diamond, his co-star in “Parade,” which won best revival of a musical. Ms. Lester — whose night had apparently taken her to the Carlyle — was deep in conversation in a corner with Julie Benko, the “Funny Girl” alternate for Michele’s Fanny Brice.Attendees discussed the beauty of the United Palace, a dazzling remnant of the golden age of cinema, which many had been inside for the first time that night.“I am so in love with that house,” Mr. Brady said.Natasha Katz, who won the Tony for best lighting design for her work on the Josh Groban-led “Sweeney Todd” revival, received a hug at the Carlyle.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesShortly before 3 a.m., many of the performers began heading out, though the party would last until after 4 a.m.“I’m excited to have a shot at the Tonys next year,” Mr. Brady, “The Wiz” star-to-be, said around 2:30 a.m., before heading for the door.“In the bigger sense, I’m excited about making history with such a melanated cast, a mostly Black creative team.” More

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      Review: In ‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ Two Souls Lost in an Ocean of Booze

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      In Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s jazzy new musical, Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are a glamorous couple succumbing to alcoholism.If not for the unbridled drinking, it might easily have been a screwball comedy. Just look at them: Kirsten, blondly beautiful with a tolerant smile and a quick riposte; Joe, curly-haired cute but too arrogant to grasp that he’ll have to up his game to win this woman.Within moments of their meeting in 1950 in New York City, he bursts suavely into song — some presumptuous romantic blather about the two of them together under “a chapel of stars.” Whereupon she teases him right back down to earth.“Wow,” she says. “Who are you wooing? It can’t be me; you don’t know me.”This is the addiction-canon classic “Days of Wine and Roses,” though, so some of us already know them. In JP Miller’s luridly frank 1958 teleplay, starring Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson, and in Miller’s somewhat defanged 1962 film adaptation, starring Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, Kirsten and Joe are the attractive pair who make a harrowing, hand-in-hand descent into self-destruction by way of alcohol.In Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s jazzy, aching musical based on the teleplay and the film, Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are an awfully glamorous Kirsten and Joe — O’Hara, in exquisite voice, singing 14 of the show’s 18 numbers, seven of them solos. Directed in its world premiere by Michael Greif for Atlantic Theater Company, this “Days of Wine and Roses” fills the old Gothic Revival parish house that is the Linda Gross Theater with glorious sound.“Two people stranded at sea,” Kirsten and Joe sing sparely, hauntingly, in the brief and perfect prologue. “Two people stranded are we.”So they are. But when they first meet, at a party on a yacht in the East River, Kirsten is a nondrinker primly uninterested in alcohol, while Joe is determined that she indulge, because then she can be his drinking buddy. That she acquiesces and then falls so far makes him her corruptor, or so her taciturn father (a wonderfully gruff Byron Jennings) will always believe.“Get rid of him, Kirs,” he tells her when it is already too late. And anyway it’s the oceans of booze in their relationship that really need to go.Lucas and Guettel, who mined the same midcentury period to great success in their 2005 Broadway musical, “The Light in the Piazza,” in which O’Hara also starred, have each spoken publicly of past personal struggles with substance abuse. Excising the heavy-handedness of previous versions of “Days of Wine and Roses,” and softening the details of Joe’s degradation, they go deeper into the heart-rending familial fallout of addiction.Lucas (book) and Guettel (music and lyrics) occasionally presume the audience’s familiarity with the plot, or steer so far clear of melodrama that they veer into emotional aridity. But they also capture unmistakably the bliss that Kirsten and Joe feel inside their bubble of a threesome: just the two of them and alcohol, throwing a private party that goes on and on.The high that makes sobriety so unthinkable: James and O’Hara as a couple whose lives disintegrate.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot for these reveling lovers the swelling strings of Henry Mancini, who scored the film; in the cocktail-mixing song “Evanesce,” Guettel gives them bright, fast music, frenetic and danceable — and when they do a bit of soft-shoe in salt spilled on the floor, there’s a playful heedlessness to their sandpaper percussion. (Choreography is by Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia.) This is the high that makes sobriety so unthinkable for Kirsten and Joe, even as their lives disintegrate.Which they do, alarmingly, despite their love for each other and for their hyper-capable daughter, Lila (Ella Dane Morgan), who learns very young to look after herself, and to lie to cover for her parents. It’s Joe who finds the strength, eventually, to choose their child over alcohol, and Kirsten who feels abandoned by her husband, as she clings to what was their private world.Affecting as O’Hara is, Kirsten is less fully drawn than Joe, whose back story makes him a recently returned veteran of the Korean War. (The combat flashback Joe suffers during one drunken binge feels gratuitous.)Kirsten gets no such context, and consequently seems oddly contemporary, which makes the show, for all its ’50s design flourishes, feel unrooted in time. (Sets are by Lizzie Clachan, costumes by Dede Ayite.) Kirsten is aware of the sexism that pervades her era — she makes snappy reference to the minuscule number of female senators — but the show doesn’t entirely seem to be. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)There is no sense of the opprobrium that would greet a female alcoholic in the 1950s, let alone one who leaves her child, or the severe judgment that would be passed on a married woman who sleeps with strange men when she’s on a bender. Or how any of that would contribute to Kirsten’s own self-loathing.Still, this “Days of Wine and Roses” has wells of compassion for her thrall to alcohol.“Don’t give up on me,” Kirsten writes to her daughter. She might even mean it when she adds: “I’ll be home soon.”Days of Wine and RosesThrough July 16 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More