The love triangle has been a staple of Broadway musicals for decades, but composer-lyricist Adam Guettel’s Days of Wine and Roses subverts convention at just about every turn. That’s probably to be expected from an operatic adaptation of the 1962 Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie centered on a glad-handing PR executive (Brian D’Arcy James), a secretary turned stay-at-home mom (Kelli O’Hara), and the paramour who threatens to upend both of their lives: alcohol.

The Oscar-winning theme tune, a Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer standard, is completely absent from this one-hour-45-minute, intermissionless show, which opened Sunday on Broadway after an acclaimed run at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theatre Company. Instead, Guettel delivers a jazz-inflected score that’s fitting for the mid-20th-century Mad Men-era setting and the often jarring subject matter, one that makes up in tricky chromatic phrasing and time signatures what it lacks in harmonic earworms.

Guettel also reteams with book writer Craig Lucas (with whom he worked on his breakout 2005 musical The Light in the Piazza). Lucas’s script follows the major downbeats of the movie with almost slavish devotion: Kelli O’Hara here takes on Kirsten, the Remick role as the chocolate-loving teetotaler whose introduction to the Brandy Alexander by D’Arcy James’s Joe leads her on a downward spiral. This newfound lush soon finds herself unable to recover from the allure of booze despite the efforts of Joe, her stalwart father (Byron Jennings) and their young daughter (Tabitha Lawing, who delivers an impressive vocal performance after a tentative start).

The fortysomething O’Hara may seem slightly too old to play the innocent ingenue in the rushed early scenes, which Lucas and Guettel speed up to get to the dissolution that forms the core of the plot. The hurried opening minutes also make it hard to see what drew these two addictive souls to each other aside from the appeal of their third wheel, a love affair that gets a jazzy minor-key treatment in the duet “Evanescence” about the short-lived appeal of booze. Later, D’Arcy James and O’Hara are in magnificent voice for their dueling solos “Forgiveness,” where the quest for AA-approved serenity proves dauntingly elusive, at least compared to the object of other aspirational anthems in the musical theater canon.

These are two drunks who understand, and embrace, the appeal of belts — singing with a vocal clarity that stands in sharp contrast to the fuzzy-headed state of their characters. It’s as if they can only achieve that kind of sustained lucidity in song — the hard fight for sobriety is less easy to maintain.

In his first full musical in nearly two decades, Guettel delivers a chamber piece with a laser focus on his tragic central couple — to the exclusion of nearly all else. Curiously, we never get a song from Byron Jennings as Kirsten’s sadly embittered father or from David Jennings as Joe’s preternaturally patient AA sponsor. (Even the couple’s daughter, a youngster forced by circumstances to grow up way too fast, gets only a few haunting duets with her struggling, mostly MIA mother.)

Director Michael Greif’s production is stylish and efficient, thanks to Lizzie Clachan’s urbane sets (vastly slicker in the less confined space of Broadway’s Studio 54), Dede Ayite’s period-perfect costumes and Ben Stanton’s effective lighting. D’Arcy James and especially the luscious-voiced O’Hara sound fantastic performing Guettel’s dauntingly complex score. But this is an off-putting exercise on both a narrative and a musical level — one that may leaving you pining for less wine and many more roses.