Someone Picked a Dilly

Some people mumbled "Gilbert and Sullivan" two years ago when Alan Jay Lerner and Richard Rodgers announced that they were forming a new partnership. But if new D'Oyly Cartes are quietly waiting to be launched, they will have to wait a long time. Rodgers' and Lerner's first musical -- / Picked a Daisy -- was postponed indefinitely.

The show is about extrasensory perception, but the trouble is clear to any one with ordinary perception: Lerner has been dragging his feet. When he works, the poor man works hard, to be sure. He sometimes stays up all night to get a single line for a lyric. He has spent two weeks on one couplet. It can take him months to write the words to an entire song. Then he hands it to Rodgers--who demoralizingly creates a finished tune in 20 minutes.

"We have a draft of the script and a few completed songs," said Rodgers last week, while Lerner sulked silently in Hollywood. "The draft is in pretty good shape. I've seen plays go into rehearsal in worse shape. But the stuff isn't there. We need a script and the score." He insists that "the partnership will continue." There are still some love-mes as well as love-me-nots on the daisy.

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