Dick Van Dyke Explains Why He Hates the ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ Film Adaptation

Whenever a Broadway show becomes a movie, fans have loud opinions about the adaptation. Since Broadway shows and movies are such different mediums, changes have to be made to make things work, and sometimes fans are not happy about those changes. Take Bye Bye Birdie, for example. The Broadway show premiered in 1960 and the film came just three years later. Dick Van Dyke starred in both adaptations as Albert Peterson, and it turns out he actually hated the way the film came out!
In a new interview on SiriusXM’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Van Dyke opened up to Cheers star Ted Danson. “Bye Bye Birdie, the movie was a drag because we couldn’t make out what it had been,” Van Dyke said.
Danson asked him to explain what he didn’t like about the film version and questioned whether it was Van Dyke’s part that was changed. Van Dyke responded, “The Ann-Margret part was rather small on Broadway. And they wrote special songs for her, and took other songs out, and it just changed the whole pitch of everything. Paul [Lynde] was really pissed all the time. But that was just his nature.”

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Van Dyke’s wife, Arlene Silver, added, “A lot of people liked the movie, and it makes me laugh when people come up to him because I know how much he doesn’t like it.”
While the film version came out just three years after the Broadway show, things had truly changed a lot in America. While the film does showcase Ann-Margret’s character a lot more, it also moves away from the original story’s emphasis on the Peterson/Alvarez relationship. Several songs were also missing from the film version, and the theme song “Bye, Bye Birdie” was written exclusively for the movie.

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New episodes of SiriusXM’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name premiere every Wednesday on the SiriusXM app and wherever podcasts are available. Tell us, do you prefer the Broadway or movie version of Bye Bye Birdie?

1950s Musicals
November 2020
Bright and brassy, toe-tapping musicals from the 1950s
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