Bye Bye, Birdie
NBC, a few years ago, started a tradition of staging a live musical in early December. Not all have been critical successes, but they get good ratings and I suspect they’re the type of family-friendly programming that holiday advertisers love, making them easy to sell.
The first such production was “The Sound of Music Live,” followed by “Peter Pan Live,” “The Wiz Live,” and — coming up in early December — “Hairspray Live.” (The FOX network also got into the act, with “Grease Live” this year.)
This past week, they made a very early announcement of the 2017 production — “Bye Bye, Birdie!” As I posted on Facebook the other day, this is my favorite source material of any of the live TV musicals so far.
I say that — but the truth of the matter is that I’ve never seen “Bye Bye, Birdie!” on stage, and this is a case where the movie version is different in some significant ways from the original stage version. There was also a 1995 TV movie starring Jason Alexander, Vanessa Williams and Tyne Daly, and that one was supposedly much closer to the original stage production.
The two biggest changes, as I understand it: In the original stage version, Albert (Dick Van Dyke on Broadway and in the 1963 movie) is Conrad Birdie’s agent who really wants to be an English teacher. In the movie, he wants to be a chemist— which sets up some slapsticky stuff involving a Flubber-like chemical he’s created.
The other big change from the stage play is that the role of the teenage girl, Kim, was greatly increased in the movie as compared to the play. That’s because the movie producers hired Ann-Margret for the part, and she was the “it” girl of the moment. The stars who’d been brought over from the Broadway production, including Van Dyke and Paul Lynde, were less than thrilled by the shift in emphasis. Paul Lynde quipped that the movie should have been titled, instead of “Bye Bye, Birdie!”, “Hello, Ann-Margret!” The woman who played Kim in the original Broadway production famously said that anyone who likes the movie never saw the Broadway show.
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Because of these two factors, the plot and flow of the movie are substantially different from that of the play.
The title song, by the way, was not part of the original Broadway production — it was written for the movie, to showcase Ann-Margret, who sings it to the camera in front of a plain blue background.
If you’re a “Mad Men” fan, you may remember a storyline in which the advertising agency attempts to duplicate the number with a no-name model to promote a new soft drink, only to realize that the number didn’t really work without Ann-Margret.
The movie made the title number so famous that it has been incorporated into stage productions ever since that time, and it was also used in the 1995 TV movie.
So, I’m wondering whether the live production in 2017 will be closer to the movie — which has been seen by millions more people— or the play. I seem to recall that “The Sound of Music Live” kept close to the stage production in a few minor ways that surprised people only familiar with the movie.
The live NBC productions have been criticized for not using a live audience. Instead, the productions are shot on a sound stage, with realistic scenery like you might see in a movie or TV show, which eliminates the need to change sets quickly. The performers simply move from set to set as the story progresses. FOX’s production of “Grease Live!”, which I did not see, was praised for not only having a live audience but incorporating it into some of the scenes in creative ways. Since “Bye Bye, Birdie!” includes a scene set during a broadcast of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” I’m wondering if 2017 will be the year that the NBC team decides to bring in an audience somehow. I also wonder whether the “Grease Live!” producers might have done a better job with “Bye Bye, Birdie!” than the NBC producers will.
