BYE BYE BIRDIE HISTORY
Producer Edward Padula had the idea for a musical initially titled Let's Go Steady, a "happy teenage musical with a difference". Padula contracted with two writers and Charles Strouse and Lee Adams wrote seven songs for their libretto. Padula, Strouse, and Adams sought Gower Champion as director/choreographer, who until that time had choreographed only a few musicals. (Fred Astaire and Morton DaCosta had already declined.) However, Champion did not like the book, and the writers were fired. Michael Stewart then took their place. Stewart's first draft, Love and Kisses, focused on a couple thinking of divorce whose children persuade them to stay together, a theme soon taken up by the Disney film, The Parent Trap.
Champion wanted "something more". "The 'something more' had been right there in the newspaper. Rock-and-roll idol Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army in September, 1957, and soon left the US for eighteen months in Germany, provoking a media circus that included Elvis's giving a specially-selected member of the Women's Army Corps "one last kiss". After brainstorming, Stewart and Adams "came up with the idea of a rock-and-roll singer going off to the Army and its effect on a group of teenagers in a small town in Ohio. The name of the singer initially was 'Ellsworth', which was soon changed to 'Conway Twitty' before we discovered there was already a Conway Twitty who was threatening to sue us, and then, finally, 'Conrad Birdie'".
The original 1960–1961 Broadway production was a Tony Award–winning success. It spawned a London production and several major revivals, a sequel, a 1963 film, and a 1995 television production.
In New York, the Broadway production opened on April 14, 1960, at the Martin Beck Theatre, transferring to the 54th Street Theatre and then the Shubert Theatre, closing on October 7, 1961 after 607 performances.
The original Broadway cast included Dick Van Dyke, Chita Rivera, Paul Lynde, Dick Gautier, Susan Watson, Kay Medford, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Michael J. Pollard.Reilly understudied as Albert Peterson for Van Dyke,who periodically took time off (including a two-week hiatus to film the pilot episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show) and returned to the leading role.
