Daisy Gamble is a woman of extrasensory talents – she sings and flowers bloom, and she always knows where you’ve placed your keys – but it’s her smoking habit that leads her to Dr. Mark Bruckner, a psychiatrist who will attempt to hypnotize her addiction away. In Daisy, Dr. Bruckner discovers the case – and perhaps the love – of his life as he unlocks Daisy’s past self, an 18th century British aristocrat named Melinda Welles. Mark becomes increasingly enamored of Melinda as he watches her relive her great love affair with Edward Moncrief. All is going well until Mark decides to publish his findings, and Daisy realizes she’s been unwittingly along for the ride!

After last year’s acclaimed run of Finian’s Rainbow, Irish Rep is proud to present Burton Lane’s other great Broadway musical, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, written with Alan Jay Lerner, newly adapted by Director Charlotte Moore. This 1965 musical boasts one of Broadway’s most beautiful scores, with songs including “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” and the title song “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” performed at Irish Rep by an on-stage ensemble led by Conductor Gary Adler.

The all-star cast features Stephen Bogardus (Bright Star) as Dr. Mark Bruckner until August 8, then Ben Davis (Les Miserables) from August 9-Septeber 6, John Cudia (Phantom of the Opera) as Edward Moncrief, and Melissa Errico (Finian’s Rainbow) as Daisy/Melinda.

The plot of the 1965 Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever centers on reincarnation. A kooky young New Yorker, Daisy Gamble, visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Bruckner, for help in kicking her smoking habit. Under hypnosis, she reveals a past life in late 18th-century England as a woman named Melinda Welles. Eventually the doctor is convinced that Melinda is not a fabrication on Daisy’s part, and he realizes he’s falling in love with her (Melinda, that is—not Daisy). Meanwhile, Daisy—unaware that she has introduced Bruckner to Melinda—finds herself falling for the doctor. The show enjoyed a respectable run in its first production and earned three Tony nominations, but the libretto, by Alan Jay Lerner—who also, along with Burton Lane, wrote the songs—didn’t quite work. Over the decades, On a Clear Day, like Daisy, has had different incarnations, but its problems have persisted. The 1970 Vincente Minnelli film (with screenplay by Lerner) moved the regression sequences to the early 19th Century and altered Melinda’s circumstances entirely. A 2011 Broadway “revisal” changed Daisy from a straight woman to a gay man at a time not long before the Stonewall riots and made Melin …Read more