Lyricist Lee Adams and composer Charles Strouse recall the making of their golden-age Elvis spoof as the Kennedy Center opens a revival.
Lee Adams, the 99-year-old lyricist of “Bye Bye Birdie,” doesn’t remember much about creating the show in 1960, but he can quotethat came out during the opening night festivities: “‘Bye Bye Birdie’ is neither fish, fowl nor good musical comedy.”
“Bye Bye Birdie” was more than a hit — it won the Tony for best musical, became part of the golden-age canon, routinely gets revived at high schools across the country and is coming to the Kennedy Center this month as part of its Broadway Center Stage series. And while for Adams and Strouse its creation is a fading memory, the show is a flash point in a friendship that has lasted three-quarters of a century.
Even as royalty checks came in for “Bye Bye Birdie,” Adams continued his day job for a bit. “I was young and broke and someone said I could get you a job at NBC and it’s very, very simple: Every half-hour you go to the studio and tell the announcer the traffic and weather report for that hour,” he recalls. “I made it all up in my mind. I didn’t call anybody. The weather reports are always the same. So I made them up. But I got my $40 a week.
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