New Openings on Broadway

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.

The show finds its subject in Conrad Birdie, an Elvis Presleyish crooner, and in his shrieking teen-age worshipers. But happily the show's object is to uncover fun 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 quite make love interesting, they often brighten it with glints of hate and vary it with an amusing roadblock to the altar--Dick's mother. Zestfully played by Kay Medford, she is a murderously possessive mamma forever jabbering of self-sacrifice, threatening suicide and pleading for a minimum in funerals: "Just wait till Mother's Day, wrap me in a flag, and dump me in the river." With contrasting skill, Paul Lynde plays a teen-ager's father trying to assert himself, first at home, then scene-stealingly on TV.

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, and can boast a spanking enough breeze to explain why things now and then get blown about.

A Second String (adapted by Lucienne Hill from a novel of Colette) portrays the home life of an egocentric French playwright-philanderer who is almost never at home. Despite his having a secretary-mistress as well as a wife on the premises, he just dashes demandingly in and out. When mistress and wife are not waiting on him, they are waiting for him, while a neglected teen-age son keeps hoping for more from papa than a quick pat on the back, and a sophisticated elderly actress drops by to deliver a few verbal lefts to the chin. In time the wife becomes a sufficiently aware and impatient Griselda to force a showdown with the mistress, only for the two women to find confederacy more sensible than civil war.

Whatever wit or wisdom the original Colette story possessed has been all but boiled out of it by turning French into English and a novel into a play. What is technically a drama of situation becomes in practice a mere conversation piece, with the same topics and tete-`a-tetes recurring over and over, and with the talk itself never bright for long, and not often bright at all. With a sturdy cast--Shirley Booth, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Cathleen Nesbitt, Nina Foch--somehow acting in a mild jangle of keys, an always thin story becomes a largely tedious one.

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