Here's something kinda interesting. As you may know, when the 1960 Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie was turned into the 1963 movie Bye Bye Birdie, an awful lot of it was changed including about 75% of the book. The character of Albert Peterson — the role played in both by Dick Van Dyke — went from being Conrad Birdie's agent (who is at heart an English teacher) to being a songwriter (who is at heart a biochemist)…and did you know that the screenwriter who did the conversion, Irving Brecher, was also the person who wrote the Marx Brothers movies At the Circus and Go West, was an uncredited writer on The Wizard of Oz and the creator of the TV series, The Life of Riley?
But forget about him. One of the big changes for the movie was the addition of the title song performed at the beginning and end by Ann-Margret. An awful lot of the bizarre changes from stage to screen seem to have been done to boost the impact of that lady who was making her screen debut…but the title song was probably a good addition. Ever since, whenever Bye Bye Birdie has been remounted for the stage, the remounters almost always find a way to insert that title song, usually as a finale.
This is a video in which the song has been turned into an opening number. It's from a 2015 production done at The Stratford Playhouse in Houston, TX by Stratford High School…and I want to emphasize that this is a high school production. I don't think you'll be able to tell that from the video which looks pretty professional to me. Some amazing musical comedy voices in there.
Anyway, they did this very clever staging of the title song to open the show. I don't know if the folks behind this production invented this. I thought at first they might have picked it up from the unsuccessful 2009 Broadway revival but I looked it up and that version did the song at the end. And where the heck did those new lyrics come from? Take a look…
And while we're at it, here are two more scenes. First is a little of "An English Teacher," a song which never made it to the movie. Then comes their staging of "The Telephone Hour," one of the few numbers from the show that seems to have made it relatively unscathed from stage to screen and back again to stage. Some of the audience members look askance at what's going on around them but it's a well-staged number.
I went to a high school full of kids from show business families — we had Bonnie Raitt and David Cassidy, both of whom went on to stardom, both of whom had fathers with serious Broadway credentials — and we couldn't have pulled off something like this. I'm also impressed by the directing and editing on the video itself…