Girl-Child

She may only be a baby sitter, but her appetites lead straight back to the nursery, and her cotton candy dress scarcely hides her wickedness. "I'm not dirty," she coaxes, pulling off her slip. "I'm full of womanly feelings." Then, in a skelter of pillows, the play's moral rings down on her and she dies in an athletic attempt to seduce the hothouse boy she has her eye on. But as played by Nymphet Barbara Harris, she conquers whole audiences night after night, making Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad the most notable success of the off-Broadway season.

In the days before Lolita made the girl-child a femme fatale, Barbara was in Chicago, toying with improvised variations on a theme called "Too Tempting to Men" with the Second City theater group. Now, at 25, she is a woman playing a girl, a trick she accomplishes with such hilarity and grace that she has become more tempting than ever. Last week Alan Jay Lerner and Richard Rodgers signed her for the lead in their first musical together, and Sid Caesar is building the first of his new fall TV series around her.

Barbara joined the Second City troupe as soon as she finished high school, came to New York for last year's From the Second City revue on Broadway; hers were the cast's best notices. She left the group last winter to join the Oh Dad cast, but most nights she turns up at Greenwich Village's Second City club after the play and joins in the late show there. "Oh Dad is the thing that keeps me going, though," she says. "It's a part you could do a hundred ways. I don't play her as mean as I might, because to me, she's an understandable girl. Nutty but funny. I play her funny." And she proves that funny can be sexy, too.

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