On A Clear Day You Can See Forever at Irish Rep

They credit Charlotte Moore with the direction and adaptation so I'll be curious to hear about the changes she makes.

Anyone who's a fan of Barbara Harris simply must watch the Altman film NASHVILLE. It's a long but brilliant time capsule of 1976 that concludes with an exhilarating performance by Harris that sends chills down your spine.

I hope they have stuck to the original book. I didn't care for them changing Barbara Harris's role of Daisy into a gay young man. Somethings are better left alone.

Reminds me of a deceased friend of mine (cancer is a bitch), who had a fabulous and usually filthy alternate name, MAD Magazine style, for every show he ever saw or danced in. Given that this show is a little on the obscure side, for a good year or so I actually believed its title was "On a Queer Gay, You Can Pee Forever," and that it was some 80s Greenwich Village agitprop show.

So it's a combination of the stage libretto and screenplay? Is it safe to assume "Love With All the Trimmings" will be in?

I have a $24 ticket for tonight, can't make it. Available for pick up at the box office. PM for details.

I was there tonight and while it’s an improvement over the last revival, which granted is not setting a very high bar, this new adaptation is a disappointment in its own right.

First the score: Tosy and Cosh, Don’t Tamper with My Sister and When I’m Being Born Again have been cut in their entirety. Warren has been cut, because, well, there’s no good explanation, but obviously because of that the intro to On the S.S. Bernard Cohn (You with someone else but Warren/Was he bashful or was he foreign) has also been cut and Wait ‘Til We’re Sixty-Five has been reworked into a trio and then group number because I guess they just couldn’t part with this song too. I LOVE Wait ‘Til We’re Sixty-Five, but both the Broadway revival and this incarnation just didn’t/don’t understand the song and how it should motivate Daisy. Cutting Warren is a big mistake IMO.

Melinda’s story is still in the show and it takes place in the 18th Century. None of the jazz singer stuff from the revival remains. The revival could have really been interesting if they had just allowed Harry to fall for David Turner as Melinda, adding a layer of questioned sexuality into the mix, but they weren’t brave enough to do that- not that it’s a great idea to change Daisy’s sex in the first place!

There will always be an intrinsic problem with the show for a modern audience. At the time of the original, ESP, hypnotism, past lives, reincarnation were all big things and exotic ideas. Lerner was entranced himself, but the novelty of seeing some hypnotized on stage just doesn’t hold up in 2018. This stuff is barely good enough for a cheap Vegas show, so that needs to be downplayed in favor of the human element. Having the choice of a safe life with Warren is all the more important to making this angle work, and I just don’t understand what this adaptation was going for.

What does work about the show is the score. The OBCR is proof of that as it still plays like gangbusters, and most of the numbers were quite nicely sung and performed, but the slog of the remaining/altered book to get to them undercut the effect they may have had.

Maybe this show’s book is too problematic to ever have a perfect production, but if that’s the case then give me what does work. Present the full score with enough dialogue to string the spine of the plot along and let the music and lyrics shine.

About 2:15 with intermission