April 14, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

Producer Edward Padula was worried. He liked the show he was working hard to raise money for, but he was taking a big risk on whether Broadway audiences would cough up the top ticket price of $8.60 to see it. The head of a team of novices all new to the theatre, Padula himself had never tried on a producer’s hat before, though he had several shows to his credit as stage manager and was the oddly credited “Book Director” for the short-lived The Day Before Spring in 1945, the second Alan Jay Lerner/Frederick Loewe collaboration after What’s Up? His chosen librettist for Birdie was Michael Stewart, recently part of the now legendary writers’ room on Caesar’s Hour (Sid, that is), perfecting the art of comedy sketch writing alongside Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon. And though he had two short-lived Broadway revues to which he contributed, Birdie would be Stewart’s first shot at writing a full book, the art of which he would sharpen on such long running hits as Carnival, Hello, Dolly!, I Love My Wife and 42nd Street. Birdie’s songwriters were Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, marking their Broadway debut as a team, later responsible for future top-notch scores like All American, Golden Boy, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman. And Birdie’s director/choreographer was Gower Champion who, though renowned as a famous dancer notably on screen, had recently turned to staging revues. Bye Bye Birdie would mark his first staging of a book musical, the beginning of a remarkable run of hits and eight Tony Awards (his final one, posthumously, for 42nd Street).

Little could Birdie’s creatives have realized that only a few days past its one-year anniversary that they would win the lion's share of Tony Awards handed out on April 16, 1961, at the Waldorf Astoria Ballroom. Champion took home two; one for his direction and one for his choreography, yet famously, Chita Rivera did not win for Featured Actress. She had ridiculously been stuck in that category due to her billing below the title. And who beat her? Tammy Grimes for playing the title role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, the same mislabeling as Rivera in an even bigger part. It was all such nonsense. Dick Van Dyke found himself in the wrong category as well, winning as Featured Actor in a Musical. Side note: It wasn't until twenty-three years later with Rivera's fourth nomination that she finally got her first Tony. That trophy for The Rink gained a mate nine years later when she received a second one for the title role in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Until her death in 2024, over the course of her seventy plus-year career at age ninety-one, she was Tony nominated more than any other actor or actress: ten times.

When it premiered in 1960, Elvis Presley had been a superstar for about four years. Basing Birdie’s plot on the time he was drafted into military service in 1958, the creatives took a real-life incident and gave it a full-blown, fictional counterpart in Conrad Birdie. Audiences’ familiarity with Elvis made it easy to imagine how he would impact a small town like the imaginary Sweet Apple, Ohio—a rock star suddenly thrust into hum-drum middle-American lives. It made perfect sense that grown women might faint and that teenagers would turn against their parents’ admonitions of such a corruptible influence on their virginal youth. The authors took full advantage of this ripe satirical setting and ran with it. Despite what Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times (he didn’t get it), most reviews echoed John Chapman’s sentiments in the Daily News: “The funniest, most captivating, and most expert musical comedy one could hope to see in several seasons of showgoing.” Side note: Shortly after Birdie opened, Atkinson retired as the Times chief theatre critic after a thirty-five-year run (his closing line of his review was “Bye Bye Birdie is neither fish nor fowl nor good musical comedy. It needs work”). Perhaps all the other raves gave him reason to think his time had come and gone.

According to Charles Strouse in his 2008 memoir, Put On a Happy Face, “The show Ed Padula told me about was then called Let’s Go Steady, and it was indeed about teenagers. Ed wanted it to be a ‘happy teenage musical with a difference'—the difference being our teenagers would be nothing like the ones portrayed in 1957’s West Side Story. Ed had contracted two book writers named Warren Miller and Raphael Millian, and Lee and I quickly wrote seven songs (three of which survived) to fit their libretto.”

To placate Champion (who liked the music but not the book), Padula fired Miler and Millian and brought in a succession of people to work on it, briefly among them Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Strouse and Adams knew Stewart from their days working at summer resorts like Green Mansions in the Catskills and were responsible for finally convincing Padula to hire him. And it was Stewart who came up with adding the Conrad Birdie element to the show, which interested Champion, but didn’t hook him entirely. To sweeten the pot, Padula pitched that perhaps Champion could also play the lead opposite his then wife-Marge Champion.

The whole process remained a tough sell to investors even after the sensible hiring of Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera (although the leading contender had been Eydie Gormé, who would have gotten the role had she not gotten pregnant). Money was so difficult that on the opening night in Philadelphia, Strouse reports in his book that the major worry was of a “very empty lobby overseen by bored box office personnel with deep stacks of unsold tickets behind them.” Unbeknownst to Strouse at the time, was the fact that just before the curtain rose, Padula found himself $75,000 in the hole for the posting of a bond that no show can open without. He desperately called anyone who could help, and it was his great fortune that Goddard Lieberson, the esteemed producer of Original Cast Recordings at Columbia Records, picked up the phone. He stepped in with the full amount in exchange for the rights to produce the recording (a good thing for both men). The next morning, according to Strouse, once the Philly critics weighed in “[there were] lines of people curling throughout the lobby and into the street.” From that moment on, Birdie was a hit and most of the credit over the years has rightfully gone to Gower Champion, who worked the creative team like a dog musher, whipping the musical into shape until he got what he wanted. The evening ran the gamut from the boisterous staging of “The Telephone Hour,” to the finale, which forwent a big finish and chose instead to have Van Dyke wheel Rivera about the stage on a luggage cart, singing the delightfully low-key “Rosie” (my favorite song in the score).

In addition to its stellar leads, the show boasted a pitch-perfect cast. Kay Medford, who would go on four years later to portray another memorable mother—Mrs. Brice in Funny Girl—played Mae Peterson, one of the most excruciating and overbearing mothers ever to be found in a play or musical. Unfortunately, due to the character not having any songs, the original cast recording provides no evidence of what Medford did in the show. Paul Lynde, first discovered in the Broadway revue New Faces of 1952, had his breakout role as Harry MacAfee, frustrated father to teenage Kim. The role was beefed up continually throughout the rehearsal process, due to his uncanny ability to get a laugh on nearly anything he did. In fact, in the great song “Hymn For a Sunday Evening,” a heavenly tribute to Ed Sullivan, his “Ed, I love you!” was an ad-lib that the creative team kept in the moment he came up with it during a run-through.

Dick Gautier was Conrad Birdie and received a Tony nomination, though he lost to Van Dyke. Gautier would later achieve a certain level of fame as Hymie the Robot on Get Smart, the hit late 1960s TV comedy. Kim MacAfee was played by Susan Watson, who was a go-to ingenue through the 1960s and early ’70s, with credits that included Carnival, Ben Franklin in Paris, Celebration and No, No Nanette.

Michael J. Pollard, a future Academy Award nominee for Bonnie and Clyde was Hugo, Kim’s boyfriend, and as a member of the chorus and understudy to Van Dyke, was Charles Nelson Reilly. Only a year later, Reilly would win a Tony Award as Bud Frump in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which he followed by playing Cornelius Hackl in Hello, Dolly!

And lest you think Let’s Go Steady was quickly renamed Bye Bye Birdie, it wasn’t. Many other titles were bandied about including Going Steady, Love and Kisses, The Day They Took Birdie Away and even Goodbye Birdie Goodbye, before landing on the right one. But then again, Michael Stewart had a knack for working on shows that didn’t get their titles right at the start: Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman—without even an exclamation point to top it off—was far better served as Hello, Dolly!

So, happy 65th to Bye Bye Birdie, still being performed the world over. Not bad for a show that if it were a person, would now be eligible for social security.

Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.