Bye Bye Birdie Blu-ray Review
Watch this 'Birdie'.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 12, 2012
It's common wisdom that the so-called "rock musical" was born with
Hair in the late sixties and then given a
major boost a year or two later with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's iconic
Jesus Christ Superstar, and
while that may be technically true (at least insofar as the typical understanding of the rock musical idiom goes), it's
really possible to make a convincing argument that the
real first rock musical was an unassuming little show
that opened on Broadway in April of 1960 without much advance hype and with no huge name stars in its cast. That
"little" show turned out to be one of the major blockbusters of the season, eventually taking home the Best Musical
Tony Award that year and making relative newcomer Dick Van Dyke an overnight sensation (co-star Chita Rivera was
already fairly well known for her turn in
West Side Story as Anita, but few would have considered her an A-list
leading lady in the day).
Bye Bye Birdie played on the then well known news of one Elvis Presley having been
drafted into the Army, serving up a deliciously wry slice of social commentary and satire that featured an absolutely
infectious score by a team no one had heard of before the musical opened, composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee
Adams. While the show's more traditional sounding "Broadway" tunes like "Put on a Happy Face" and "A Lot of Livin' to
Do" were soon major hits being covered by any number of then popular "easy listening" artists, the show is quite
notable for its prescient introduction of rock rhythms into the then pretty staid and formalized world of Broadway
tunecraft. Everything from the gently swaying "One Boy" to the more raucous "The Telephone Hour" pulsated with a
new kind of energy that Broadway had never really felt before, a youthful insouciance that signaled a new generation
of Broadway professionals was on the scene, and that new approaches to songwriting were going to be part and
parcel of this generational shift.
Many stage musicals encounter a rocky road in their transition from the Great White Way to the soundstages of
Hollywood. For every admirable effort like
West Side Story or
The Music Man, there's at least one
corresponding disaster like
A Chorus Line (which was bad enough to count for two all by its very self). Even
hugely acclaimed screen adaptations like Bob Fosse's film of
Cabaret often bear little to no resemblance to their
original stage incarnations. (Many who have only seen the film version of
Cabaret would probably be amazed
at
just how different the Broadway musical actually is.)
Bye Bye Birdie certainly isn't in the same "rewrite" class as
Cabaret is, but there's no denying the property was rather radically altered for its film adaptation, and the
reason
for that alteration can be summed up in one word: Ann-Margret (OK, possibly two words, depending on how you feel
about hyphens).
Ann-Margret's early career had been mentored by none other than George Burns, and the singer-actress had been
signed to long term contracts both by RCA Records (where she managed to score a couple of midlevel hit singles) and
20th Century Fox, which quickly cast her in the remake of
State Fair, after having loaned her out to United
Artists for Frank Capra's
Pocketful of Miracles. The young woman's husky yet whispery singing voice and
va-va-va-voom physical presence quickly became a sensation, and by the time
Bye Bye Birdie was before the
cameras,
there was little doubt that the character of Kim MacAfee, the young American girl chosen at random to receive a
"farewell" kiss from Conrad Birdie before his stint in the Army, had become the central focus of the film. That meant that
the
previous focus, the relationship between budding songwriter Albert Peterson (Van Dyke) and his secretary
cum fiancée Rose (Janet Leigh), was pushed off at least partially to the figurative (and occasionally even literal)
wings.
These changes as well as a few others left Dick Van Dyke feeling less than thrilled with the film, but the fact is, taken on
its own merits,
Bye Bye Birdie is one of the most ebullient screen musicals of its era. The film significantly opens
up the stage version and it also takes advantage of the medium of film in at least a couple of key sequences, including
a wonderful "jigsaw" multi-panel effect during "The Telephone Hour" and a kind of goofy, yet lovably effective, animated
element in "Put on a Happy Face". The film also wisely retained another key player from the original Broadway version
along with Van Dyke, the then largely unknown Paul Lynde, who is simply hysterical as Kim's surprisingly calm (yet
rather conniving) father, Harry.
Some of the other casting is a bit more problematic. How a typically
goyische man like Albert Peterson ended up
with a paradigm of a Jewish mother, as portrayed by Maureen Stapleton, is anyone's guess. Bobby Rydell, then a sort
of "junior Elvis" himself, is a bit self-conscious as Kim's erstwhile boyfriend Hugo. The strangest casting choice is Janet
Leigh as Albert's girl, Rosie. In the stage play, Rosie was an unabashed Hispanic woman (though truth be told, that
was an addition to the original conception of the character, made when Rivera accepted the part after several other
actresses had turned it down). Here, sporting a rather odd looking black wig and doing her best to sing and dance,
Leigh seems a bit out of place. Her performance has actually grown on me through the years, and doesn't seem
quite as anachronistic as it did when I first saw the film many, many years ago, but this Rosie is definitely not
the
Latina firebrand of the stage version.
A lot of
Bye Bye Birdie will probably leave younger viewers feeling a bit confused, even if they understand the
basic outlines of the plot. Does anyone even remember the furor surrounding Elvis' draft notice of the late fifties? Does
anyone even remember
Elvis? And how many people under, say, 30 (or maybe even 40—eegads!) are going to
recall what a weekly institution Ed Sullivan was for countless Americans huddled around their Sunday evening television
sets? But putting this temporal issues aside, the film is breezy, bright and incredibly colorful, with fizzy performances,
some laugh out loud funny moments, and that infectious Strouse-Adams score. It may not play like a "rock musical" to
modern audiences, but people in the early sixties had never really heard anything quite like
Bye Bye Birdie
before.
