The musical Bye Bye Birdie debuted on Broadway on April 14, 1960. It was a hit but not a huge one, lasting 607 performances and closing October 7, 1961. It originally starred Dick Van Dyke but he'd left well before the last performance to do The Dick Van Dyke Show on CBS. In fact, The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on October 4, 1961.
Others in the cast whose names you might know include Paul Lynde, Chita Rivera, Dick Gautier (as the Elvis clone) and Charles Nelson Reilly. Mr. Reilly had an interesting run on the show. He was not in the original cast but was hired soon after to play one small role and, more importantly, to understudy Van Dyke and Lynde. Paul Lynde was then a regular on The Perry Como Show so the night that show was on each week, Reilly played Lynde's part in Bye Bye Birdie and eventually took it over as a full-time gig.
I, of course, never saw the original show but I get the feeling it was a lot of great performances and great songs and dances carrying a rather weak story. When the movie was made, its producers didn't hesitate to jettison most of that weak story for a slightly stronger and sillier one. You'll notice in the clip below, Mr. Van Dyke sings "Put on a Happy Face" to a sad teenage Conrad Birdie fan, a show-stopping number that occurred on stage in the first act. In the movie, he sang it to his girl friend (the Chita Rivera role, played in the film by Janet Leigh) late in the proceedings. Other songs were changed or omitted for the movie and a new title song was added.
The video presents two numbers performed on separate episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show. The first is from June 12, 1960, two months after the show opened. Sullivan always claimed to have been embarrassed when he went to see the show and discovered there was a song in it about him with Paul Lynde declaring, "I love you, Ed." Apparently, Ed wasn't too embarrassed to put that number on his national TV program and later to play himself in the movie.
The other number — "Put on a Happy Face" — is from November 13, 1960. It's probably a safe assumption that they did the first number on the Sullivan show because Ed insisted on it and they did the second because business was falling off and to remind the ticket-buying public that they'd just moved from the Martin Beck Theater on W. 45th St. to the 54th Street Theater located Guess Where.
At the end of the second, Ed plugs Dick's Thanksgiving special, which I'm assuming is No Place Like Home, a show with Carol Burnett, Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer which ran November 23, 1960. Mr. Van Dyke has been under contract to CBS for some time but they'd never found quite the place to put him. That would change shortly…
