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Open a New Window

The Broadway Musical in the 1960s

Palgrave Macmillan

What's In It For You?

The Shows of 1960

It's easy to see why Frank Loesser wanted to make a musical out of Greenwillow. B. J. Chute's novel of life in a village located somewhere between Brigadoon and the first act of Allegro is bewitching, loving, wise, bemusing, and above all lyrical. It begs to sing: of the Briggs family, cursed with a wanderlust that afflicts the firstborn son of each generation; of Gideon Briggs' love for Dorrie; of two parsons wrestling for Gideon's soul, one devoted to damnation and the other to salvation; of the Greenwillow folk themselves, with their picturesque traditions and colorful dialect. "Where's my chawing turnip?" cries Gramma Briggs. "They's people at the door."

By 1960, a good musical needed a characterful score and plenty of comedy and ensemble dancing, all blended sensibly into an interesting story. But, above all, a musical needed feelings, and Chute's Neverland is loaded with them: as Gideon struggles between wanting Dorrie and wanting not to hurt her when he wanders away; as the village enthusiastically accommodates itself to the dueling reverends, for the gentle one is a newcomer to the town; as Gramma schemes to lure a much-needed cow out of mean old Thomas Clegg on his deathbed; as the Briggses try to hold together as a family even as they know that Gideon will abandon them when they most need him. Above all, there is Micah, Gideon's ten-year-old brother and virtually Greenwillow's emcee. An anxious, curious, garrulous boy, Micah interprets Greenwillow for us simply by never ceasing to ask it questions — interview it, so to say. And it is Micah who brings about the novel's climax, confronting the Devil that has cursed the Briggs family men. In fact, it is the lovable reverend, not the Devil, whom the confused Micah attacks (and is Saved by), showing us that it is love of God rather than fear of hell that holds Christianity together. The curse thus ends, Gideon stays put, and the Good Father slips out of town, His work done.

It's a beautiful story delightfully told. But without the restless Micah, it would lack energy, even a story line. Micah is the story. So when Loesser and his co–book writer, Lesser Samuels, decided to downplay Micah in favor of the youngest Briggs, Jabez, they limited their show. True, Micah is a literary more than a dramatic conceit; true as well, their Jabez, five-year-old John Megna, was an ace in the hole, a scene-stealer who added to rather than detracted from his scenes.

It was Megna who introduced us to Greenwillow, zigzagging happily across the stage of the Alvin Theatre bare-ass in a long shirt as villagers gathered for the opening chorus. A honey of a piece in tricky 7/4 rhythm, "A Day Borrowed From Heaven" announced a score for the ages, perhaps Loesser's greatest set of music and lyrics — yes, even after Where's Charley? (1948), Guys and Dolls (1950), and The Most Happy Fella (1956). They's people at the door, all right, in a series of character pieces that, like all of Loesser's scores, invents its own sound style. It's folk music for rather than by folk, in the pounding defiance of Gideon's "Summertime Love" and his keening "Never Will I Marry"; in the off-kilter modal scales of Dorrie's "Walking Away Whistling" and "Faraway Boy"; in the reverends' battle of worldviews as they simultaneously extemporize for the pulpit in "The Sermon"; in the leaping ninth that distinguishes the show's anthem, "The Music of Home"; and in Greenwillow 's oddest number, Gramma and Clegg's "Could've Been a Ring," a kind of deadpan barn dance. Folding himself into Chute's idiom, Loesser expanded and even improved upon her, with Gideon's bitter invocation of the "flimsy-dimsy looking for true love," or Gramma and Clegg's "cozy-close to mostly."

So the novel sang after all, with George Roy Hill directing, Anthony Perkins and Ellen McCown as the lovers, Cecil Kellaway and William Chapman as the reverends, and Pert Kelton and Lee Cass as Gramma and Clegg. Joe Layton laid out the dances, mainly to bring forth the flavor of Greenwillow folk life — courting, Hallowe'en, and the like. However, it was not a great staging. Perkins did reveal an unexpected singing voice to match McCown's operetta soprano, and he turned "Never Will I Marry" into an aria with country-style wails, true Greenwillow. And though Kellaway's unsteady, toneless voice did not match Chapman's opera baritone, Kellaway had charm. But Peter Larkin's sets and Alvin Colt's costumes never told us where Greenwillow is — some of the chorus women looked like Kiss Me, Kate rs wearing the Islamic chador — and Hill should have forced Loesser and Samuels to trim their horribly verbose book. It has Chute's ring:

JABEZ: Gideon! I've had a cookie this big! Big as the moon! And then another cookie, two rowdy buns, a bilberry tart, and Dorrie kissed me twice and I'm ready to go home.

However, its attempts at humor don't really land:

GIDEON: Mr. Clegg, might I ask you a puzzling question?

CLEGG: Many people do.

GIDEON: Why are you so mean?

CLEGG: That's the one many people do.

No, Greenwillow's virtue is its score, the only medium through which Chute's novel can communicate to a theatre audience. A fable made of whimsy and atmosphere is readable, not playable. Onstage, it becomes too real, as real as ... well, Brigadoon.

The critics were unable to parse the show on its March opening, in a season that had already seen Take Me Along, The Sound of Music, and Fiorello! before 1960 began. There was no pressure to discover a hit, only Kellaway and John Megna got the reviews, and Greenwillow lasted but three months, at that entirely on its advance sale.

It might have made an odd but lovely movie in 1956 or 1957, when the novel was enjoying its vogue, perhaps with Perkins and Kellaway themselves, for the former was hot and the latter a beloved veteran. Today, Greenwillow is nothing but a cast album. Still, it stands out as a score bursting with feelings in a decade that seems all too often to be making musicals without any — Let It Ride!, Mr. President, I Had a Ball, Baker Street, Breakfast at Tiffany's, How Now, Dow Jones, Sherry!, Golden Rainbow, Jimmy.

Greenwillow was of course a Major Production — thus the big advance — but six weeks after it opened, in mid-April, came a Sleeper and a major hit, Bye Bye Birdie. If Greenwillow was a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-era musical play, on the serious side and living within its singular enlightening reality, Bye Bye Birdie was a Rodgers-and-Hammersteinera musical comedy. It had consistency of style and told a more or less believable tale. But it was also fast, satiric, and made for nothing but contemporary fun: Elvis gets drafted, kids war with parents, new director-choreographer plays host to new stars and new writers, and no one knows anyone who doesn't like it.

Actually, Gower Champion wasn't new as a director-choreographer. He had been dancing on Broadway as far back as 1939, in a talent-filled theme revue called The Streets of Paris, and directed and choreographed another revue, Lend an Ear, in 1948. But such a tidy little show had hardly any need of a master showman, and Champion won no réclame. During the 1950s, Champion and his wife and dancing partner, Marge, were largely performing for MGM. Again, he entirely staged a small revue, Three For Tonight (1955); but this is not how history is made. Bye Bye Birdie was the turning point, for now Champion was returning to Broadway to launch a career as a musical-comedy super-director. And, indeed, Champion's approach to the look and pacing of the form was brand-new. He liked scripts to zip from one number to the next. He liked songs to be staged, not just sung. And he liked the vocals not to cap a scene on a blackout but to take us from one scene to the next, the view changing as we watch.

So, for instance, Bye Bye Birdie has one of the speediest expositions in the musical's history: Dick Van Dyke, songwriter, publisher, and manager of teen idol Conrad Birdie (Dick Gautier), is losing him to the army. Van Dyke's longtime, exasperated fiancée, Chita Rivera, bustles in to say goodbye forever:

VAN DYKE: (frantic) My pills, where are my pills? The little white ones I take when I'm overwrought.

RIVERA: Here.

VAN DYKE: Not so much. Break it in half.

RIVERA: You're thirty-three years old, Albert. You can take a whole aspirin.

Inside of two minutes, we have not only the plot premise but the key to the two leads: he's a doofus, while she's the strength and the smarts of the outfit. It's Rivera who dreams up a last PR shot, when Conrad will sing "One Last Kiss," plant one on a fan's lips, and march off, all on television.

We're almost ready for the next scene — but not till a little music develops this odd couple. It's Rivera's vocal, with spoken interjections from Van Dyke, "An English Teacher." Plot number and ballad at once, this is the Heroine's Wanting Song. But there's a catch to this one. She doesn't just want him. She wants him out of the music business and in academia, where they'll be not boy-got-girl but professor and faculty wife. The daydreaming Rivera and the distracted Van Dyke give Champion something to present during the singing — his endless, hapless search for some pointless object till she calmly and instantly finds and hands it to him. Still urging the show onward, Champion brings Rivera before the traveler curtain to finish the number alone while the stagehands ready the next surprise:

The kids. In "The Telephone Hour," the teenagers of Sweet Apple, Ohio, tie up the phone lines to discuss the dating status of the show's second couple (Susan Watson and Michael J. Pollard, before his eerie-nerd phase in such films as Bonnie and Clyde ). Champion called for a stage-filling box of cubicles in which sixteen boys and girls hurled argot at the audience ("What's the story, morning glory?"), while one boy, a young Van Dyke without a Rivera, fruitlessly sought a partner for the prom in a pubescent squeak.

Next, the American family: Watson is the girl Conrad is to kiss, so he's staying at her home with her father (Paul Lynde), mother (Marijane Maricle), and little brother (Johnny Borden). Father is that favorite American character, the Irascible Curmudgeon, Mother is long-suffering, and, in a twist, Junior is no problem but a cute little guy who's always subverting Papa's tirades by being helpful and respectful. When the grown-ups are out chasing their runaway kids, Borden offers Lynde his peashooter. This is a perfect setup for the golf-cart Caligula that Lynde played for most of his career. "A peashooter?" he violently crabs. "What good's a ..." Then, eyes tightening as his head wobbles in misanthropic glee, he cries, "Give it to me!"

This social cross section gives Bye Bye Birdie a structural unity that many musical comedies lack. They seem to take place anywhere and for unknown reasons, while Birdie deals with something that actually happened. When American kids claimed a music of their own, they also began to create their own culture: clothes, language, morality. So the show must present us with the opposing gods of the warring societies: the Rebel and the Mom.

Birdie, of course, is the Rebel, suited up in Marlon Brando's Wild One leather jacket and, on his first appearance, in a crowd scene in Grand Central Terminal, absolutely silent, almost totemic but for his sleazy grin. In fact, he is a piece of redneck trash, opening beer cans so they gush all over Lynde's kitchen and romancing Watson on The Ed Sullivan Show with "Okay, brace yourself, chick!" But when he sings, he displays the husky baritone and samba-ing body parts. Like Elvis, Conrad has It, and we see why he has inspired American girlhood to create "the Conrad Birdie scream" and to sing "We Love You, Conrad" ten thousand times as an act of devotion.

Van Dyke is not only a doofus but a mama's boy, and Mama (Kay Medford) has taken nagging and pushing to an art form. Van Dyke wants her to ride in a cab to avoid the crowded subway:

MEDFORD: Nothing is too crowded for a mother. I'll go during the rush hour, that's the worst time. Wait a minute — how many blocks is it, after all? Only a hundred and seven. I'll walk.

Naturally, Medford loathes Rivera, making numberless remarks about her ethnic background and her age:

MEDFORD: This is Rose? I can't believe it. She looks like Margo when they took her out of Shangri-la.

Conrad is there so that, when he finally departs for the army, society can be made whole again; and Van Dyke's mother is there so that Van Dyke has someone to stand up to and conquer so he can finally deserve Rivera.

One reason why Bye Bye Birdie was a sleeper was that, except for Champion, it was almost entirely a project of nobodies. Rivera, of course, was known for her Anita in West Side Story (1957). But Van Dyke, Medford, and Gautier were unestablished, and Lynde, after a solid debut in New Faces of 1952, got lost in minor television work and touring shows that never made New York.

Above all, composer Charles Strouse, lyricist Lee Adams, and librettist Michael Stewart were first-timers with a Broadway show all their own. Their expertise, then, is astonishing. If Stewart's book is adroit, clever, and — as Champion demanded — extra-quick on the draw, Strouse and Adams' songs are a course in how to find the emotional reality in farce while centering its sense of humor, Musical Comedy 101. The rock-and-roll spoofs, "Honestly Sincere" and "One Last Kiss," are so apt that out of context they are pure rock and roll. Similarly, "One Boy," a burlesque of the ballads teenage girls love, became a ballad on its own when Rivera sang a chorus while pondering Van Dyke and their troubled engagement.

Champion's restless staging emphasized this richness of texture, as when Susan Watson sang "How Lovely To Be a Woman" while changing from a frilly negligée into sock-hop jeans and a sweater, expanding a character song into a comic bit while underscoring the show's overall teens-against-the-world theme. Champion highlighted it in "Honestly Sincere," letting Conrad's overwhelming of the Sweet Apple girls in his skintight jumpsuit of gold lamé take in a brand-new enthusiast, the mayor's mousy wife.

Paul Lynde had his moment in "Kids," a curse upon the rock-and-roll generation wittily set to a Charleston — the rock and roll of the father's own youth. In between the lyrics were spoken assaults, such as "Why don't they lower the draft age ... to around eleven?" Best of all is an ensemble number, "Normal American Boy," in which cynical reporters grill Van Dyke and Rivera, Conrad ogles his fans, and we get a look at the dishonesty in American celebrity marketing — yes, even from Van Dyke and Rivera, who at one point simultaneously offer bizarrely contradictory stories of Conrad's past.

Bye Bye Birdie is without question a fine composition. But it was Champion who assured the piece its first success. Aside from the speedy playing tempo, the cartoon-bright designs, and such novelties as the overture's starting with a vocal of "We Love You, Conrad" and continuing with footage of the singer in action, there was the choreography itself. This took in a cheer-up dance for Van Dyke and two bereaved Birdie fans after "Put On a Happy Face," an ensemble number for "A Lot Of Livin' To Do," and two ballets for Rivera and the men dancers, "How To Kill a Man" (by firing squad at first, but also guillotine, poison, knife, bomb, and a mob hit) and an orgy at a Shriners' convention.

Topping all this was the simplest dance possible. Yet it was another novelty even so. With the plot wound up and the stage cleared of all but Van Dyke and Rivera, the pair sang "Rosie." They danced a bit. And then — after all that generation war and culture war and Paul Lynde wanting to murder everyone under forty — the two embraced and the music went yes and the curtain came smiling down.

Even without Champion, Birdie went on to classic status. London liked it, Hollywood and television have made their versions, and isn't it time for a revival? Tommy Tune almost gave us one, in a touring package for him and Ann Reinking (later Lenora Nemetz) in 1991. Tune as doofus is an odd proposition. He's not even the protagonist of his own story. Yes, he's the lead: but his girl friend runs the show. Originally, Rivera had most of the numbers. Even Van Dyke's one real love song, "Baby, Talk To Me," was staged around her, in a bit of set representing a bar, where four men in close harmony backed Van Dyke (singing over the phone) while Rivera vacillated at the center of the action.

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Excerpted from Open a New Window by Ethan Mordden. Copyright © 2001 Ethan Mordden. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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