Theater: Please Don’t Pick on Daisy

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. For 3½ years Alan Jay Lerner worked and reworked this show, and finally his drafting board has been set to music. What he has proved is that he is the sort of writer who needs a writer. When he leaned on Bernard Shaw, he produced the book for the musical masterpiece My Fair Lady With the late T. H. White to guide his pen, he wrote the passable Camelot. His unseen ally this time is John L. Balderston, who wrote Berkeley Square in 1929, and Balderston was apparently not meant for the ages.

Berkeley Square trundles a young American back in time from 1928 to 1784, when he falls hopelessly in love with an impoverished girl of the English nobility. Clear Day puts a kooky American girl named Daisy Gamble (Barbara Harris) into a hypnotic trance and transports her back to 1794, when she was the bride of the rakish Edward Moncrief, and was destined to drown in the shipwreck of the Trelawny. With this paleo-romantic glue, Lerner tries to stick together a libretto incongruously torn between the pseudo science of extrasensory perception and the pseudo metaphysics of reincarnation.

What the show is blessed with is Barbara Harris, a versatile, beguiling imp of a clown. She can fumble a cigarette between her teeth like a crazed nicotine addict and fire off machine-gun bursts of smoke. She can walk as if her body were an afterthought, or collapse in a chair like a punctured accordion. She can chew grammar like bubble gum, or make English ring with the elegance of George III’s crystal.

It is easy to see why she fascinates a daring young psychiatrist (John Cullum) who wants to frogleap Freud into the mental future. After all, she knows his phone is ringing before it rings, and she can grow plants faster than Jack’s beanstalk by singing nicely to them. She sings nicely to the audience, too, especially in Burton Lane’s best song, What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?, a wistful identity query in which Daisy wonders why the good doctor dotes on her 18th century self. In other numbers, Lane’s score improves Lerner’s book by ignoring it. A totally extraneous injection of vitality is supplied by Greek actor Titos Vandis who comes on in Act II as an Onassis-like character and changes with delightful inconsistency into Zorba the Greek. The lust for lust is a trifle self-conscious in a big, scurrying Herbert Ross dance (At the Hell-rakers’) in which girls are hustled across the stage like silhouettes in a military class for aircraft recognition. Robert Lewis has directed the entire enterprise as if he were killing time, which in the case of Clear Day is redundant.

There is always Barbara Harris to console the playgoer. But who is to console Barbara Harris?