`FINIAN'S' MESSAGE WELL-STATED, DATED.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

``Finian's Rainbow'' is a crock of liberal blarney, but it's blarney with smarts, great songs and the best of intentions.

The show, which turns 50 this year, is the second offering in the new ``Reprise!'' series of semi-staged concert musicals. And, although it's receiving a splendid birthday bash at UCLA's Freud Playhouse, you'll easily see why it's seldom revived.

With its odd synthesis of whimsy and social commentary, its fairy-tale plot grafted onto an earnest lament on race relations in the Deep South, the book by Fred Saidy and E.Y. ``Yip'' Harburg appears at this juncture not just charmingly dated but almost dangerously naive.

Similarly, Burton Lane's hummable melodies and Harburg's yearning lyrics form a fascinating grab bag of mismatched ideas: from magical schmaltz (``How Are Things in Glocca Morra'') and lush love songs (``Old Devil Moon'') to spry comic wordplay (``Something Sort of Grandish'') and rousing gospel knockoffs (``The Begat''). If bizarre contradictions were gold nuggets, ``Finian's Rainbow'' might be the richest musical ever coined.

Meaning that it's an excellent choice for ``Reprise!'' - a series intended not only to preserve but re-examine a quintessential American art form. Producer Marcia Seligson deserves to be congratulated, and the remarkable cast, coping with some key last-minute changes, deserves to be canonized.

The best case for song-and-dance sainthood belongs to William Biff McGuire, stepping in just days ago for Ned Beatty as the title character. Finian McLonergan, a twinkly eternal optimist from the Emerald Isle, arrives in the Dixie backwater of ``Rainbow Valley, Missitucky'' with his daughter Sharon (Andrea Marcovicci), hoping to grow rich by planting a pot of gold in the fertile New World. Finian admits he ``borrowed'' the treasure from a leprechaun because ``who else would have gold in Ireland?''

What father and daughter don't count on is having the leprechaun (Malcolm Gets) follow them, determined to recover his stash lest he turn into a human. Nor do they plan on landing in the middle of a land-grabbing scheme by redneck Sen. Billboard Rawkins (a cartoonishly menacing Robert Mandan), whose greed puts him at odds with the sharecropper locals and, in particular, with strapping Woody Mahoney (Rex Smith).

Though bottom-heavy with subplots, ``Finian's Rainbow'' is ostensibly a love story, and Smith and Marcovicci (clearly suffering from an opening-night cold) make their paramours credible. Marcovicci, a superb cabaret storyteller, has a sensuous, womanly huskiness perfectly attuned to Smith's sly, easygoing machismo (imagine a hayseed Frank Sinatra).

But romance here gets overshadowed by deeper shades of social satire and wishful idealism. That strange combination produces some awkward moments, as when a black butler taunts Sen. Rawkins by doing an exaggerated Stepin Fetchit routine, or when the senator finds his Inner Soul Man by magically acquiring a new skin tone. For all of its high-minded sincerity and inventiveness - how many musicals can rhyme ``Carmen Miranda'' with ``Red propaganda''? - the show carries a troubling whiff of postwar Broadway's cultural smugness.

But with performers like these, why carp about politics? Scampering around a set composed of a wishing well, a poetically crooked tree and moss-covered steps, the cast under Will Mackenzie's savvy direction really gets its hoedown-mojo working on big ensemble numbers such as ``If This Isn't Love.''

``Finian's Rainbow'' evokes a time when Americans turned to the musical theater as a test tube for new dreams. Those dreams died with ``Camelot,'' but they still flare up now and then. And look - some of them shine today in ``Rent.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Finian's Rainbow.''

Where: Freud Playhouse, Macgown Hall, Sunset Boulevard at Hilgard Avenue, Westwood.

When: 2 and 8 p.m. today, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $40 to $45. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Though bottom-heavy with subplots, ``Finian's Rainbow,'' with Andrea Marcovicci and Rex Smith, center, is ostensibly a love story.