"The Telephone Hour" number. Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage.

"The Telephone Hour" number. Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage.

"The Telephone Hour" number. Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage.

Left front: Daniel R. Johnson as Conrad Birdie. Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage.

  

Bye Bye Birdie

by Charles Strouse (music)
Lee Adams (lyrics)
Michael Stewart (book)

Presented by Lyric Stage

June 19 - 27

at Carpenter Performance Hall
Irving Arts Center
3333 North MacArthur Blvd.
Irving, TX 75062
972-252-2787

$25-$50

8pm Thursday-Saturday; 2:30pm Sunday
Runtime: Two hours, 20 minutes with one intermission

Composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams might be getting some bigtime Dallas love right now for the ballyhooed revised version of their 1966 musical It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman!, opening Friday at the Dallas Theater Center. But there should be an equal amount of eyeballs and media attention on a far superior musical in their oeuvre, 1960's Bye Bye Birdie, which is receiving a momentous revival at Irving's Lyric Stage, bolstered by a 31-piece orchestra.

The fifth full-orchestra, fully staged revival from Lyric in just three years, Birdie may not have the soaring highs of the theater's productions of Carousel (2007) and The King and I (2009), but it's the most consistently enjoyable and cohesive of them all.

In Superman, Strouse and Adams experimented with superhero and comic book culture in the idiom of another uniquely American genre, the musical. Birdie, which features a book (by Michael Stewart) that doesn't need revising, takes on a much more powerful force in 20th-century American culture: rock 'n' roll. Set in 1958, when America had not yet seen the explosive teenage frenzy that would come with the Beatles' invasion in 1964, there's a kind of quaint innocence in the rebellion represented by the girls (and their mothers) who go cuckoo for the pelvis-gyrating dreamboat, Conrad Birdie (Daniel R. Johnson).

Conrad is, of course, based on Elvis, and the musical satirizes the craze sparked by this newish phenomenon of rock 'n' roll and the man who remains, to this day, its biggest and most sexually charged star. They don't call him the King for nothing.

In Bye Bye Birdie, Conrad is about to be drafted into the military and shipped overseas (which happened with Elvis). His manager, Albert Peterson (Steve Barcus), and Albert's assistant/love interest Rose Alvarez (Catherine Carpenter-Cox), concoct a media event in which Conrad will kiss an ordinary teenage girl from his fanclub. The lucky gal selected is Kim MacAfee (Mary McElree) in Sweet Apple, Ohio. That leads Conrad, Albert and Rose on a wild adventure in which they discover that parties in Middle America aren't restricted to the Tupperware variety.

These exploits unfold as Conrad convinces the local teens that life's too short to be constantly guarded by authority figures; as Albert and Rose continously re-examine their relationship; and in that process, as a frustrated Rose embarks on a quest for independence. The latter leads to one of the more comic but slyly profound commentaries on the idea that things aren't always what they seem, in the beautifully executed "Shriner Ballet" scene. (Kudos to choreographer Ann Nieman, who gets fine dance work from the ensemble throughout the show.) The Shriner segment is exemplary of the offbeat tangents found in other musicals of the 1960s (Sweet Charity comes to mind).

It's becoming a little embarrassing to keep heaping such praise on Lyric Stage, but this production, directed by Cheryl Denson, is deserving of it. Every time Lyric puts something on stage, it is generally so above other local productions of musicals that going to the Irving Arts Center for a Lyric show is more than just a night at the theater, it's an event. If you haven't discovered Lyric yet—why the hell not?

Conductor and music director Jay Dias leads the 31-piece orchestra, which greatly enhances the intricacies of Strouse's score (those horns in "Hymn for a Sunday Evening"!). For this production, Robert Ginzler’s original Broadway orchestrations are used for the first time since the show's debut. Dias nicely balances the volume of the orchestra with the onstage action, and his timing is impeccable.

As Kim's parents, Mike Gallagher and Wendy Welch are fantastic. Radio personality Gallagher has the gift of comic facial expressions that sidle up to the point of overdone without surpassing it. He's probably the closest in type around here to rival the comic genius who created this role, Paul Lynde. He might be the show-stealer if it weren't for Charlotte Franklin as Albert's overbearing mother, Mae, who disapproves of her son's love for a Latina.

That theme of racism subtly underlies the entire show (and was indeed a big factor in America's rock 'n' roll history), and explodes in the show's penultimate song, "Spanish Rose," a terrific, satirical number expertly performed by Cox. Chita Rivera originated this role, and while it would have been ideal to cast it with a Latina actress, North Texas doesn't have a better triple-threat leading lady than Cox.

As Albert (originally played by Dick Van Dyke), Barcus is a magnetic leading man with an appealing voice and a charm that supersedes his not-tall stature. Recent high school graduate McElree shines in the vocal and acting departments as the goody-goody teenager caught between her newfound connection to Conrad and her dissolving relationship with teenage beau Hugo Peabody (Coppell High School student Mackenzie Orr, in a sweetly funny and potentially star-making turn).

The role of Conrad doesn't give Johnson, a fast-rising musical theater star in North Texas, a chance to show off his luxurious, legit tenor, and he's a little too tall and angular to exude faint-inducing, Elvis-esque sex appeal. But his charisma is infectious and his singing chops are no joke, and that's enough to believably keep the Sweet Apple honeys in a tizzy.

The scenic design (by Christopher Potter, Mamie Trotter and Woody Mahoney) effectively uses flown-in set pieces for various scenes, with a nice set of the multi-level interior of the MacAfee's home. Fantastic backdrops and curtains sparkle with iconic 1950s images (can we get that in a shower curtain?). Drenda Lewis' costumes capture the era.

The musical's final number, "Rosie," with Rose and Albert, is sweetly performed and choreographed, cleverly using a luggage-bearing cart. It's a rather quiet and adorable closing for a show that introduced Broadway to the concept of rock 'n' roll as a cultural seachange, and before musicals like Hair unleashed rock's power as a driving force onstage.

All of the lunacy in Birdie was sparked by the revolutionary power of rock and the celebrity status of its purveyors, which had been mainly held by Hollywood stars. But everything comes together happily, as musicals often do, as if to suggest that while rock 'n' roll may have initiated a cultural shift in this country, it by no means lead to a downfall.

And in the end, nothing beats a simple and melodic love song.