shoop and the bye bye birdie camp

Bye Bye Birdie is back in its first ever Broadway revival since becoming what the current website refers to as a "sleeper" hit back in 1960. That production originally ran about a year and a half (607 performances), back when a show that ran a year and a half could still be called a smash. The current revival features John Stamos, Gina Gershon, and Bill Irwin in the roles created by Dick Van Dyke, Chita Rivera, and Paul Lynde (back then, Rivera got first billing). The revival's director, Robert Longbottom, has a lot of Good Ideas, like most professional directors do, but he had this to say about Bill Irwin playing the dad role that Lynde had played on stage and later in the 1963 film version--something to the effect of, we're going to rescue this role from the one of the campiest performances of all time.

Rescue a role from Paul Lynde? Seriously? Longbottom's statement displays a sad lack of understanding of 1) camp, 2) Paul Lynde, and 3) the show he happens to be reviving. First off, camp has two connotations, both germane in this case--one, the kind of winking, we know how silly and corny this is, but we're going to pretend to play it straight kind of attitude that dates back to such shows as Dames at Sea onstage and Batman on TV. The other not unrelated meaning refers to a distinctly gay sensibility meant to send up or comment upon seemingly "straight" material. Both meanings, and devices, are very helpful in putting on Bye Bye Birdie in the PROFESSIONAL theatre world, as opposed to the world where most of us found ourselves in or working on a production--community theatre and high school. (For the record, both Mrs. Shoop and I were in productions of Bye Bye Birdie in our respective youths--she as Rose, the lead, and me as Harvey Johnson, forever trying to hook up with Charity Garfein during the Telephone Hour number.)

In high school productions in particular, you put in a lot of the kids, you throw in the teachers and maybe the principal, and everybody gets a good laugh at everybody else. In fact, the kids get the last laugh, as it should be--they get their side of the "parents don't get it" humor from the show, plus they get to make fun of the music their parents and teachers used to like (or perhaps now, grandparents used to like) by pretending to go crazy for it. In the professional theatre world, as a recent Sunday Times article astutely pointed out, Bye Bye Birdie is a tougher proposition. Its too-innocent and too-square look at the Elvis phenomenon (already about 3 years out of date when the show opened) needed that "camp" sensibility to put the show's not entirely compatible parts (rock and roll spoof plus old-fashioned romance) in perspective. Enter Paul Lynde.

Lynde was campy before we had a word for it, hilarious if you got that he was gay, and still hilarious if you didn't. There's a moment during the 1969 (I think) Tony Awards where Lynde tears through a rendition of "Kids," sneering through the obvious lyrics and pulling laughs where they just shouldn't exist--it's amazing to watch. Or just listen to him yell, "Ed, I love you!" at the end of "Hymn for a Sunday Morning" (a tribute to Ed Sullivan) on the Broadway cast recording--the show needed that, and benefitted from it tremendously. And here's the thing--the show STILL needs that sensibility, now more than ever. Why? Because along with its goofy, square innocence, Bye Bye Birdie inadvertently predicted a number of cultural milestones, from the Beatles (mass teen hysteria) through Hair (rock music in the Broadway musical), and on through American Idol (the power of TV to create a musical celebrity). But you can't sell the show as being that clever about the future, any more than it was ever that clever about its recent past. The show itself was never meant to be, in the words of one of its parody rock and roll songs, "Honestly Sincere." It was, and is, a genial cartoon. A new production can't recreate Paul Lynde's distinctive (and, it's worth noting, often used in cartoons) voice, but to run away from it is to misunderstand what the show had going for it in the first place.

What this director needs to do is listen to Lynde voice some of his great cartoon creations for a day or two--say, Mildew Wolf, Templeton the Rat, and the Hooded Claw--plus throw in some Uncle Arthur from "Bewitched." Then he might realize that this "campiest performance of all time" is and will always be the heart and soul of Bye Bye Birdie.