It’s a Fred Astaire song from the MGM musical Royal Wedding interpolated to bring the snoozing audience back to life. She and her swinging, syncopated version of “Every Night at Seven” is the best thing in the show, and it’s not even a song from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Melinda is played by the phenomenally talented Jessie Mueller.
#Song on a clear day movie
All of which leads to insertions of extraneous songs that bear no relation to the revised book, including a terrible dirge called “Who Is There Among Us Who Knows” originally sung by Jack Nicholson in the disappointing Barbra Streisand movie version and then deleted for obvious reasons. He keeps increasing his appointments with David, hoping to see Melinda, but the hapless David thinks he wants to see him. The grieving, recently widowed analyst, more frustrated than his patients and still grieving over the death of his late wife, falls in love with the jazz singer in a case that changes his views on life, death, psychic phenomena and big band music. Connick discovers, when he puts David to sleep, that he is still a reincarnation-this time of a World War II jazz singer named Melinda who died in a plane crash on her way to her first USO tour. The psychiatrist is now played by crooner Harry Connick Jr., an agreeable stage presence (remember The Pajama Game) so criminally wasted that all he does is stand around taking notes while David, who is having trouble committing to his lover, Warren (the word “partner” in 1974 was reserved for lawyers who hung out their shingles to lure lawsuits), shows his belly button and prisses about in bell bottoms on psychedelic sets so ugly they look like the eye charts in an optometrist’s office.
#Song on a clear day update
Nothing about this fiasco makes any sense, including the update from 1965 to 1974.
This is not a revival, or even a deluded revisionist rethink.
#Song on a clear day driver
What’s left you wouldn’t wish on the hit-and-run driver who ran over your favorite cocker spaniel. She is now a flamboyantly limp-wristed, swivel-hipped cretin with a swirling navel named David. It was a vibrant, buoyant song by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane called “Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here” and although it is still the opening number of this disastrously ill-advised new production, nobody screams or applauds above a polite hey-ho, what’s next? This is because not only is Barbara Harris not around as a flaky, adorable kook named Daisy Gamble, who goes to a shrink to stop smoking and discovers, under hypnosis, she lived another life as a glamorous courtesan in 18th-century London (much confusion ensued, accompanied by a multitude of fabulous songs), but because Daisy is no longer on the scene, either. She was one of the very few genuinely electrifying stars I have seen in my lifetime who walked onto the stage, opened her mouth and drove the audience to its feet with a screaming ovation on her opening number. For starters, you don’t have Barbara Harris, who skyrocketed to major stardom in the original 1965 production.
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