Word: byes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bye Bye Birdie. A rock-n-roll call of teen-agers surrounding an Elvis Presleyish crooner named Conrad Birdie (Dick Gautier). As staged by Gower Champion, the fresh and sometimes frantic musical crashes through the evening with all the zip of a bowling ball on the loose...
...Bye Bye Birdie. A rock-'n'-roll call of teen-agers surrounding an Elvis Presleyish crooner named Conrad Birdie (Dick Gautier). As staged by Gower Champion, the fresh and sometimes frantic musical crashes through the evening with all the zip of a bowling ball on the loose...
...Bye Bye Birdie (book by Michael Stewart; music and lyrics by Charles Strouse & Lee Adams) is not particularly expert, but it doesn't have to be. There is something infectiously and rampageously lively about it. Staged with exuberance by Gower Champion, who is the real hero of the evening, Birdie has the special crazy zip of a bowling ball on the loose, of rifle shots not so much hitting the bull's-eye as overturning the target...
...wherever it lurks, whether in fathers or fantasy, peashooters or TV shows. If so vagrant a method makes things slightly untidy, it also keeps them fresh. Where the method richly pays off is in its not giving Conrad (well played by Dick Gautier) too much houseroom, in its saying bye-bye to him oftener than it squeals hello. In the same way, because a whole rock-'n'-roll call of teen-agers are often banished between aahs, or missing between oohs, they do not grow oppressive. If Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, as the love interest, never...
...Bye Bye Birdie ranges farthest, and perhaps most enjoyably, afield when Dancer Rivera crashes a Shriners' dinner and starts a small Keystone Comedy chase, now around the table, now on it, now under it. One reason why Birdie lands on its feet is that it is so seldom off them. People rarely sit, or even stand still; they drop funny remarks hastening in one direction, not so funny ones fleeing in another. Musically the show travels rather light, once or twice with an empty suitcase. But Bye Bye Birdie successfully elevates freshness above slickness, playfulness above workmanship...