Harry Connick Jr. coming back to Broadway?

IT won't be easy resurrecting a hopelessly old-fashioned musical that was left for dead seven years ago at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.

But if any team can do it, it's probably Harry Connick Jr. and his favorite director, Kathleen Marshall.

Ever since their pleasant revival of "The Pajama Game" won a surprise Tony Award in 2006 - beating out the great "Sweeney Todd" - the two close friends have been looking for their next show.

And it will be . . . "They All Laughed."

Never heard of it?

Who has?

It's some strange hybrid of the 1926 George and Ira Gershwin musical "Oh Kay!" run through the typewriter of Joe DiPietro, whose "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" has been running off-Broadway for

so long that detractors call it

"I Love You, You're Perfect,

Now Close - PLEASE!"

"They All Laughed" opened at Goodspeed on Aug. 11, 2001. The critics gave it polite enough reviews, but there was plenty of backstage trouble - the director pulled out one week before opening night - and the show quickly became just another poster in Goodspeed's foyer.

The convoluted plot involves Prohibition, a Temperance Society, bootlegging, speakeasies, a playboy, an heiress and some lovable gangsters.

But it was the songs, pulled from the golden Gershwin trunk and inserted into the story line, that carried the evening: "I've Got a Crush on You," "He Loves and She Loves," "Blah Blah Blah," "Do Do Do" and "S'Wonderful," among them.

As dopey as the plot of "They All Laughed" might be, I suspect that plenty of theatergoers will line up to hear Connick sing those songs.

In "The Pajama Game," he brought down the house with "Hey, There," "There Once Was a Man" and, accompanying himself on the piano, "Hernando's Hideaway."
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