A victim of time? Soon-to-shutter “Clear Day” deserves cast album

The heavily revised Broadway revival of the 1965 musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is closing this Sunday, January 29 after a truncated run at the St. James Theatre. Nobody ever sang “On a Clear Day We Will Run Forever” about this “revisal.” Still, its early demise will certainly be a major disappointment for producers and investors.

Yes, the show did not garner rave reviews. But, considering that it has a real star (Harry Connick Jr.) in the leading role, one might have thought it would have been critic-proof. Yet Connick hasn’t been filling all the seats. That’s understandable on a weeknight in mid-January. But I saw the show last Saturday night, and the house wasn’t packed then, either. Sad.

Perhaps the theme of reincarnation has turned people off. Or maybe it has to do with the gay aspects of the revised script (with the female protagonist of the original show changed into a young gay man from the mid-1970s who lived a previous life as a 1940s female jazz singer). That might have kept some hetero fans of Connick away. But, c’mon–didn’t they watch him on Will and Grace? Anyway, this being Broadway, where Priscilla Queen of the Desert has been running for months, it’s perhaps more likely that the show isn’t gay enough.

I felt that adapters Peter Parnell and Michael Mayer (who also directed) did a better-than-respectable job with their updates to Alan Jay Lerner’s original script, although the onstage transformation of the protagonist (using two different performers) was necessarily a little clunky. The show also changed musically from its 1965 content, with interpolations of songs from the 1970 film version of the show: “Love With All the Trimmings” and “Go to Sleep.” Additional songs by lyricist Lerner and composer Burton Lane (“Open Your Eyes,” “Every Night at Seven”) were borrowed and used as big-band selections for the 1940s regression sequences.

All this added up to a magnificent augmented score, sung beautifully by Connick and his female co-star Jessie Mueller (as 1940s band-singer Melinda). Lane, who seldom worked on Broadway, was a guy who wrote some absolutely stunning melodies. One of my all-time-favorite Broadway scores is his Finian’s Rainbow. His songs tend to haunt you. (Think “Old Devil Moon.”) And what better vehicle for a haunting score than a story about a subconsciously recalled past life?

David Turner, playing Davy Gamble (the gay florist who is discovered by Connick’s psychiatrist character to have lived a past life as Melinda), doesn’t sing with the same finesse or musicality as his two co-stars, perhaps, but he is likeable and funny. Turner has a sweetness that makes the audience root for him. And when he delivers his big second-act number “What Did I Have I Don’t Have,” his singing voice takes on considerable authority.

For me, the biggest disappointment of the whole endeavor will be if the company fails to record a cast album to preserve the memory of this unusual show. I’m glad I got to hear the James Taylor-ish rendition of “Love With All the Trimmings,” sung by Drew Gehling (playing Davy’s boyfriend, Warren) along with the charmingly bubblegum-ish, frug-alicious reworking of “Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five.” I’d relish the opportunity to listen to those arrangements time and again.

C’mon, Clear Day people! Don’t let this one slip through your fingers. Surely many fans of Connick’s who didn’t get to New York to see the show would love to hear him singing Lerner and Lane’s gorgeous songs.