Opinion

‘Clear’ catastrophe

It’s an amazing thing to watch a legendary catastrophe unfold in real time before your eyes — and I’m not talking about the implosion of Herman Cain. I’m talking about the catastrophe unfolding on the stage of the St. James Theater on 44th Street.

Decades from now, theatergoers of the future will approach some elderly folk and ask, in reverent tones: “Is it true you actually saw ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever’ with Harry Connick Jr?”

Yes, sonny, I did.

Most really terrible pieces of popular culture are utterly uninteresting. “On a Clear Day” (which is in its last week of previews — I bought tickets at full price, so I’m violating no reviewing embargo) is both really terrible and interesting in spite of itself.

Its creative team had a sensible idea: Take a problematic 1965 Broadway musical — ruined by a bad plot but notable for its fantastic songs and its peculiar but intriguing central premise — and overhaul it.

What they’ve done with it is the opposite of sensible. They decided to take a piece of fluff and politicize it — and in politicizing it, they made an even greater hash out of the story.

The original plot involved a kooky 22-year-old from Brooklyn with psychic powers who reveals under hypnosis that she was a hot pre-Victorian British chick in a past life. The shrink who hypnotizes her falls in love with the British chick. The kooky Brooklynite, who is engaged to a drippy accountant, falls for the arrogant shrink.

The new “On a Clear Day” transforms the kooky 22-year-old with psychic powers in 1965 into a 29-year-old gay guy in 1974 with no psychic powers but a supernatural capacity to annoy. Instead of a British chick inside him, he has a 1940s female jazz singer from Ohio.

Harry Connick is the psychiatrist. He falls in love with the female jazz singer. But she’s not in a female body; she’s in the gay florist’s male body. The gay florist falls for the straight psychiatrist.

Writer Peter Parnell and director Michael Meyer thought they were onto something fresh with the gay twist, but all it succeeds in doing is twisting them into politically correct knots they can’t untie.

The heroine of the 1965 version had a drippy and oh-so-bourgeois fiancée who sang her a soul-killing song about how if they stay together long enough they can get Social Security. The hero here has a boyfriend who wants to make a lifetime commitment, too — but it wouldn’t be permissible at this moment in cultural history for such a gay role model to be drippy and oh-so-bourgeois like the original.

Instead, Parnell and Mayer make the boyfriend perfect — a Calvin Klein model who’s also a lawyer helping the poor and will one day file briefs to legalize gay marriage. Our florist’s resistance to the lawyer makes no sense in the terms of the plot they’ve laid out.

Because we’re supposed to think the relationship is wonderful, Parnell and Meyer try foolishly to turn the fiancée’s song from the original into an ecstatic dance number with hippie-ish Greenwich Villagers singing joyfully about ending up in their old age in Tampa.

As for the florist and the shrink: Why is the florist pining after a straight guy? Parnell and Mayer can’t figure out a reason for that, either — or one that wouldn’t get them attacked by their friends. So they just leave it there.

It might make some sense if the straight shrink played by Harry Connick Jr. had some sexual adventurousness or perversity in him. But either they didn’t think of that, or Connick wouldn’t play that. So there it is.

When shows go as wrong as this one, everything goes wrong, and from the first minute. Watching the simpering florist flouncing limp-wristedly around the stage at the beginning serenading his flowers with the words “hey buds below, up is where to grow” might, in another context, cause ACT-UP to reconstitute itself, storm the theater and throw blood on him.

Samuel Goldwyn once told a screenwriter that if he wanted to send a message, use Western Union. My advice to the team behind “On a Clear Day” is: When sending a message, try figuring out what it is first.