EP 10 - Bring Back Birdie (1981)

OPENING

By the time George M. Cohan finished his Broadway career in 1940, he was already one of the most important figures in American theater history. With more than 50 productions to his name and hundreds of popular songs like "Give My Regards to Broadway,” "You're a Grand Old Flag," and this one you’re hearing "Yankee Doodle Boy.” Cohan built such a wide-ranging career as a producer, director, writer, composer, and performer that only someone like Lin Manuel Miranda has ever matched it. But there is one accomplishment of Cohan's that few remember today: he actually created the first successful modern American musical sequel.

In January of 1906, Cohan wrote, produced, and directed a musical comedy titled Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, about a housemaid who nearly gives up her inheritance for the man she loves, a wisecracking New Yorker named Kid Burns. That role turned an unknown actor named Victor Moore into one of the biggest comic stage actors of that era. The following year, Cohan brought Kid Burns back for a follow up called The Talk of New York. While the original had a respectable run of 90 performances, the sequel almost doubled that with 173.

Since then, however, sequels have been a rarity on Broadway and successful ones even rarer. Sure, there’s exceptions to the rule, like William Finn’s Falsettos and Neil Simon’s Eugene trilogy, but many more writers and composers have failed trying to recapture their former glory. As the NY Times puts it: “Any stage sequel is a delicate operation, especially if the original work set the bar high.”

Take the 1931 political satire from George and Ira Gershwin called Of Thee I Sing, which also starred Victor Moore and had an impressive run of 441 performances and became the first musical to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. So a couple of years later, the Gershwin brothers teamed up again for round two called Let 'Em Eat Cake, with the same producer and the same three lead actors. However, this show closed after just 89 performances and unlike the original has never been revived on Broadway.

Fast forward to the 1970s, and two massive hit musicals would get the sequel treatment. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was a genuine smash that ran for more than 1,500 performances and spawned a successful movie adaptation with Dolly Parton. But the stage sequel called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public didn't even survive two weeks. Similarly, the musical Annie also had a long run of almost six years and won seven Tony Awards, but neither of its two follow-ups ever made it to Broadway. You can learn more about this flop in last season’s episode on Annie 2. But before composer Charles Strouse tried to bring back Annie, he first tried to bring back Birdie in 1981 with his lyricist Lee Adams and book writer Michael Stewart.

While Adams had most of his success with Strouse, Stewart would go on to write the book for other hit musicals like Hello Dolly! and George M! as well as the lyrics for Barnum. But as a trio, Bye Bye Birdie was the first time any of them had ever written a full musical. Strouse and Adams explain why it took almost six years to finally bring the first Birdie to the Martin Beck Theatre in 1960:

STROUSE: “When we first started writing Birdie, there was no rock-and-roll singer, and it was a very curious thing. There were five writers that were brought in over the course of things and nobody liked the book at all. We had said from the start, use Mike Stewart … because Mike Stewart was with us in summer stock, and we knew how clever he was. But they kept on looking for other writers, named writers and all, including Mike Nichols and Elaine May. They were number four or so, and nobody liked anything anybody did. And they finally said, ‘All right, let's try this guy that you've been plumping for.’ And that was Mike Stewart. And then Lee made the suggestion, I'll never forget that, of making it about a rock-and-roll singer…”

ADAMS: “And we said, he said if an Elvis Presley type comes into this Midwestern family, what will happen? And Mike grabbed the idea and and ran with, and made this wonderful book.”

The cast was led by Chita Rivera, Richard Gautier, and a then-unknown Dick Van Dyke, with dancer and choreographer Gower Champion directing for the first time. It opened to mostly positive reviews, and became a career-defining production for all those involved. It would go on to win 4 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, with Best Direction and Choreography going to Champion and Best Featured Actor going to Van Dyke. But what’s interesting is that Van Dyke wasn’t really a singer or dancer before this show and almost didn’t even make it to Broadway.

Dick Van Dyke: “I only found out many, many years later that in Philadelphia ,when we were doing the out of town tryout, the producers wanted to replace me. They didn't think I was coming through, and Gower Champion said, 'This kid's going to be all right' and stood up for me and kept the job. If I had known that I would have jumped out the window. I was so thrilled, so thrilled to be up there doing it.”

After its initial run of a year and half, with 607 performances, Bye Bye Birdie became one of the most licensed shows in the country for the next two decades, a staple of high school auditoriums and community theaters from coast to coast. It had become a top moneymaker for Tams-Witmark, the company that handled its amateur licensing rights. And so naturally they wanted a new Birdie musical they could license to more schools and theaters. So Strouse, Adams, and Stewart happily agreed on a sequel and worked on it for a couple of years.

But then in early 1980, two Broadway producers got a hold of the script, Lee Guber and Shelly Gross. Best known for producing concerts on Broadway, they did have short-run plays and musicals on their resume as well. And they saw something in Bring Back Birdie and decided this story shouldn't be confined to just community productions. This was a sequel that deserved Broadway.

BEGINNINGS

When the Broadway production of Bye Bye Birdie closed in 1961 and the national tour played its final city the following year, that didn’t mark the end of the show, not by a long shot. Because then theaters around the country began producing the musical, and each of these Birdie productions was controlled by a licensing company, which is actually an enormous part of the Broadway economic model. Yet it’s one that most of us, even actors like myself, don’t know that much about. So Sean Cercone, who was the founder and CEO of Broadway Licensing Global, went on The Producer’s Perspective Podcast and explained what happens once the rights to a show are publicly released:

“Let's say there's 1,800 professional theaters, about 7,000 community theaters, and 50,000 high school productions a year. We take those and break them down into individualized, whether it's state markets or city markets … and we try to maximize the value of each one of our shows in those markets. Right? … We want to be the best producer and partners for those regional theaters that we can possibly be. It's not just a transactional one-way license. It's not, hey, here's the book, music and lyrics, and we're the copyright police. We want to be there because we are the organization and the team of people who are now moving on with this show and being the good stewards of the show.”

And the steward for Bye Bye Birdie was Tams-Witmark, which had been doing business since 1925, when two rival companies in New York merged into one. There was the Tams Music Library, which had spent decades renting out scores and scripts for operas and light musicals. The other was M. Witmark and Sons, the publishing house that had helped build the sheet music industry with songs coming out of Tin Pan Alley. After thirty years of competing for the same customers, the two finally joined forces, and Tams-Witmark was born.

They became a gatekeeper for what happened to many shows after they left Broadway, especially Golden Age musicals from the likes of Cole Porter, Jules Styne, and the Gershwins. But by the 1960s and 70s they also began acquiring more contemporary shows like Gypsy and A Chorus Line. At the same time, high school drama programs were popping up all over the country, and it was Tams-Witmark that held the rights to exactly the kind of shows those programs wanted: big ensembles with familiar songs and stories.

If you were part of high school or college musical productions like I was, then you likely remember those soft-bound scripts and music books that were passed around on the first day of rehearsal, with the name Tams-Witmark emblazoned across the front. And it came with a warning under their name that read, “Make cuts and notations lightly, and only in soft, black lead pencil. A charge will be made if all cuts and notations are not erased before this book is returned.” My college director of Kiss Me, Kate was quick to remind us of this penalty, and on the last day of the show erasers were handed out to all of us as they double-checked that scripts were clean and clear before we turned it in.

These booklets were used over and over again, allowing Tams-Witmark and a show’s writers to go on earning money for decades, one production at a time. But the original Broadway producers and investors held a stake too, since a portion of that ongoing revenue flowed back to them as well, often the only way a flop could ever recoup its losses. So whenever a show kept getting licensed year after year, there was a whole web of people counting on those checks. And few shows kept the residuals coming quite like Bye Bye Birdie.

Strouse and Adams, meanwhile, kept writing shows together and won their second Tony Award in 1970 for Applause, which was a musical adaptation of All About Eve starring Lauren Bacall. The following year, this same duo gave America one of its most recognizable television themes, when Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton sat down at the piano to sing "Those Were the Days" over the opening credits of All in the Family.

Strouse's next major stage production, though, in 1977, didn’t include Adams at all. Instead, he teamed up with lyricist and director Martin Charnin to write the score for what would be the biggest hit of his career, Annie. The following year, Strouse and Adams did finally reconnect for a show simply titled A Broadway Musical, which opened and closed on opening night and is considered one of the worst flops in Broadway history. And it would be another two years before the Birdie sequel, as Strouse recalled in a 2011 interview:

“Originally, it was commissioned, because Birdie was and is it's still one of the largest, if not the largest, performed shown in high schools and summer stock and that kind of thing. And it was commissioned by the organization that leases those rights as a piece to do, not on Broadway.”

Now, it must be pointed out that Tams-Witmark’s push for a sequel was highly unusual. The company's traditional administrative role was to simply license existing shows, not creating new ones. Nonetheless, this offer was probably very appealing to Strouse and Adams who hadn’t written a hit musical in 10 years. It would be a low-stakes way to revisit beloved characters, write some familiar tunes, and tap into a built-in audience of schools and community theaters. So they got together with their old book writer to develop a continuation of the Birdie story.

Charles Strouse: “A wonderful script that Mike Stewart wrote … and a producer saw the script, or Mike sent it to him, why? We didn’t, God knows, but it was. And he said, 'I want to produce this on Broadway.' And of course we thought, you know, ‘Gee, well wonderful.'”

In case you missed that, what Strouse said under his breath was ‘Gee, well wonderful.’ And that would not be the only time this show generated such a muted reaction. But in the beginning, there was certainly a level of excitement and motivation as Bring Back Birdie transitioned from community theater to the Broadway stage in 1980. Because when it was announced in July that Joe Layton of Barnum fame would direct, Stewart also stated that “This show was written for Chita.” Now, maybe the script really had shifted by then to put Rosie at the center of things. Or maybe Stewart just didn’t want it known that this whole thing started as a licensing company's pitch for high schools.

Whatever the real reason, the timing of Stewart’s statement is hard to ignore. Because that same month, in a regional touring production of Bye Bye Birdie, Rivera was actually reprising her role of Rosie for the first time since Broadway. Hmm. The show played in St. Louis and Kansas City, with John Travolta’s older brother Joey starring as Conrad Birdie.

Now, with Conrad being the title character in both Birdie musicals, I think I should take a moment to explain where exactly the name came from. According Strouse’s memoir, the singer was initially called ‘Ellsworth' and was meant to be an Elvis Presley type character. But then it changed to Conway Twitty, which was the actual name of Elvis’s main rock 'n' roll rival at the time. However, Twitty threatened to sue the writers if they used his name, so they cleverly came up with a parody version, and the name Conrad Birdie was born. And in that 1960 production, he was young and sexy and made all the ladies swoon. But for the sequel, all the characters are now older and in a different place in their lives than where they ended in Bye Bye Birdie, as Chita Rivera explains:

“Well, Conrad Birdie's now about 44-45. He's fat and he's now the mayor of a town in Arizona, and he wants to be a respectable person. But what he has not done, he hasn’t really gotten rid of that gold suit, it’s stuck away somewhere.”

So this time around, casting went looking beyond the usual theater actors for the title role, and instead chose newcomer Marcel Forestieri, who also happened to be an Elvis impersonator. Now, he had never even done an audition before reading for the part of Conrad. And even though Forestieri was only 27 years old, he had been imitating the King for 10 years, so he certainly had the moves and persona they were looking for.

For the other two lead roles, the producers definitely wanted to get Rivera and Van Dyke back together again onstage, especially since both of them had become much bigger stars than they were two decades earlier. However, in an interview with Bring Back Birdie cast member Jeb Brown, he speculates why Van Dyke couldn’t do the show:

“I'll tell you the truth, and I think Dick Van Dyke and others can take it. But they would have used him, but he had just had a bad experience in Music Man … So Dick Van Dyke at the time had not stopped drinking. And was just, was struggling. So they thought we can't mess, we can't do that.”

Whatever the reason, Van Dyke did ultimately turned down the chance to reprise the role of Albert Peterson. Rivera, on the other hand, was open to the idea but needed a bit more convincing. In July of 1980, producer Lee Guber said, “In our talks with Chita, we've been up, down and around. Now, we're back on the summit again.” And by the following month, it was confirmed that she was coming back for the sequel. In fact, she would be the only returning cast member from the original Birdie. Among the new cast joining her was Maria Karnilova to play Albert's mother Mae, Maurice Hines, who was featured as a soul-singing detective, and of course a whole new batch of kid performers for various roles and ensemble parts. And at callbacks in the Belasco Theatre, Brown, who was just 16 at the time, got to read opposite some young actresses:

“They had three girls that day trying out opposite me for the role of Jenny, who's Albert and Rose's daughter. And the three were Kristen Vigard. I sat in the wings listening to Kristen Vigard, you see Vigard was the original Annie at Goodspeed Opera House, replaced by Andrea McArdle. And she sang beautifully, and then we read. And then I went back into the wings, and out came Robin Morse, who got the part. She sang, and we read, again gorgeous. And then, unbeknownst to me, emerged from the wings, Andrea McArdle, who, you know, it was just four years ago, was Annie, and she was a stratospheric star. She was, you know, heaven. She was a really dynamite performer. And there she was. There I was in the wings, that magical Belasco Theatre, and she stepped out. And in the darkness, the piano players struck up, and she sang “Out Here on My Own," this beautiful song, brought down the empty house.

Now, mind you, Annie was still running over at the Alvin Theatre, with Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead role at that time. But Bring Back Birdie still needed someone in the lead role to replace Van Dyke, since he was no longer an option, not just someone as talented but someone famous as well. They ended up choosing a another well-known song-and-dance man: Donald O’Connor, best known from his award-winning turn as Cosmo in Singin’ in the Rain in 1952. By the 1970s, though, his film career was almost non-existent, and it was random TV appearances and stage work that kept him busy. He even took nitroglycerin pills, so that he would have the stamina to finish performances. But after that led to a heart attack in 1971, he had to quit taking those.

Over the next few years he faced problems with both alcohol and depression as well, until he finally collapsed in 1978, and according to some reports was paralyzed from the waist down. His body slowly recovered with the help of physical therapy. But even more importantly, his mind and spirit also recovered. In letters he wrote to friends and family, he talked about being a changed man and how he’d never take anything for granted again.

So then comes 1980, and a pivotal moment in O’Connor’s career. That fall marked his return to movies after 16 years, taking a supporting role in the film adaptation of Ragtime, directed by Milos Forman. And then that December, O’Connor began rehearsals for Bring Back Birdie, in what would surprisingly be his Broadway debut…

Donald O’Connor: “Which is pretty late for me, considering when I started in vaudeville and in pictures, because I started in pictures in 1938. And it was always really a money factor with me, you know, with the agents and so forth. You're making a lot of money—why you can't spend that much time back there. And really, nothing too exciting ever came my way. But now it seems that unless you're doing a television series or a picture, all of the work is on the road.”

Since O’Connor’s home was in California, then for him this Broadway production was like being on the road. And there was even a NY Times article about what he brought with him to make his hotel feel more like home. There was his stereo player with tapes of 1950's music and pictures of his wife and children of course as well as a rubber Snoopy doll that he never traveled without. When asked about this doll, he was a bit reticent to give a full reason behind it and simply said, “Nothing special except to me. It's my good luck thing. It goes with me.” Meanwhile, the creative team wasn't having as much luck this time around. With the added pressure of Broadway, they were finding it more difficult to agree on what a sequel should actually be:

Charles Strouse: “It's a wonderful script by the way, that was screwed up by a lot of fights. A conception where everyone was quarreling. It’s funny, we got on so well on the first one, and in the next one it was a series of quarrels and artistic conflicts/problems. But it is, I thought it had a nice score, and it happens, you know.”

And these conflicts resulted in a bloated storyline that would continue to morph and change all the way through previews, but here’s the basic gist: As I mentioned it’s 20 years after the original Birdie, Albert and Rose are now married with two children. Albert is offered $20,000 to bring back his long-lost client, Conrad Birdie, for a Grammy Award television special. With the help of a detective, the search takes Albert and Rose to Arizona, where like Rivera said, Birdie is now a mayor. Meanwhile, their children run away from home with the daughter joining a cult and the son joining a band. Back in Arizona, Rose leaves Albert, then Albert falls for a replacement Rose. Conrad dies, comes back to life, and considers running for president. Albert’s mother turns out to be a famous singer from the 1920s and sings on the TV special, before Conrad rushes in and performs as well. And Albert and Rose are finally reunited in the end.

So as you can see, Stewart’s sequel was crowded and convoluted with many more subplots than the original. However, Strouse and Adams, on the other hand, created a score that basically replicated the blueprint of their first one with several song-for-song parallels between the two Birdies. For example, instead of the grown-ups singing about kids, now the kids are singing about grown-ups. While Van Dyke sang the cheerful “Put on a Happy Face,” O’Connor sings the optimisitc “Baby, You Can Count on Me.” And Rivera originally had a ballet number with Shriners, but now dances a saloon number with cowboys. But there was one number unlike anything else from either Birdie musicals, and that was ‘Filth” sung by a punk rock band of the same name, and each of the band members sat on toilets and flushed them to end the song…yeah. In total, the show had 21 songs and reprises, with 10 people credited as orchestrators, including Stouse. By contrast, the original only had one.

And during rehearsals, the actors didn’t just have the usual set pieces and props to contend with, they also had a lot of electronics to use and navigate around. There were cassette recorders, video equipment, radios, portable Walkmans and Trinitron TVs all supplied by Sony, with video games and programming provided by Mattel Electronics.

Jeb Brown: “Designers, in particular creators, wanted to not define the decade, but wanted to sort of grab what was going to be big about the 80s, which is why we had the TV sets. It was going to be a video decade, which it was indeed. MTV hadn't even happened yet, but that's why everything was a picture of something on a television … But suddenly the appetite, the 80s appetite from,, you know, bigger or better, was seeping into the musical theater. So this set that Mitchell designed was threatening to devour us. It did. It kind of got the best of us.”

As the cast moved into the Martin Beck Theatre in mid-January 1981, director Joe was pulling double duty across two different Strouse productions, not just heading up the Birdie production, but as executive producer of the original Annie movie adaptation as well. They had just announced the casting of their 11-year-old leading lady Aileen Quinn and that filming would begin in a couple of months. So Layton was on a tight schedule when it came to getting Birdie onstage before he could devote his full attention to Annie.

When previews began on January 26th, ticket sales were fine at 68% capacity, and on that first night Layton had a pre-show curtain speech where he talked about “the show not being quite ready, that some machinery wasn’t yet working well, and that one important cast member had been ill” but none of that tamped down the excitement of that first audience…until the end of the first act when the punk rock band sings “We are filth!” while sitting on toilets and flushing them. And then intermission. The curtain came down, the house light came up, and the crowd was silent. Then one theatergoer let a low-pitched “Booo!” and gradually more joined in, from one side of the mezzanine to the other. New Jersey theater critic Peter Filichia was there that night and said, “I’ve seen around 6,000 live theatrical events in my time, but I’ve never seen or heard an audience go from love to hate as quickly as it did in one hour at the first preview of Bring Back Birdie.” So the show still had a lot of work to do, and opening night was postponed twice. The NY Times reported that the first time was “to give the cast more time to rehearse and perform” and the second time was because of more changes being made to the production.

Jeb Brown: “We would work in previews, you know, a couple of hours during the day and We were putting in a bunch of changes one night and moving out the big opening and had to get it just so the kids would come on here. They would come on, they were to fly in, we'd be on roller skates, whatever would be. And on this particular night, my high school had a group coming to the show. Twenty-five kids were in the balcony from my high school, my pals. And so when I rolled out about 20 seconds into the number, fire up my electric guitar, there was such cheer that came up from the balcony. And that was sweet. And then we did the show, we did that, whatever, we got a few boos. And the next day, rehearsal at noon, and Joe gathers the group of us in the lobby and he says, well, as you can see from last night's response, we found the opening number.

Brown never did tell Layton the real reason behind those cheers. Not that it wouldn’t mattered. Layton was working on other changes and zeroed in on two songs, titled “Shape Up” and "Don't Say F-A-T in Front of Conrad" that were basically fat jokes, and he ended up cutting them from the show. But regardless of any fixes being made to the show, audiences seemed to sense something wasn’t right, and ticket sales slowly began declining. By the end of the 31 previews, theater attendance was down to 25% capacity. And remember the Beck Theatre had about 1200 seats at this time, so that means an average of 300 in the audience that final week. Gah, that must’ve looked empty. And what could Rivera and O’Connor do? I mean, it was their names on the marquee and above the title, but all they could do was their best each every night. Because in many ways the success of Bring Back Birdie was riding on them.

Chita Rivera: "To have the responsibility of having the lead role in a show is hard sometimes, because you do want to look out there and see those bottoms on those seats. You want them to be pouring out of the theater. A lot of that depends on the critics.”

But when opening night finally arrived on March 5, 1981, the critics were in no mood to help. Because after more than a year’s worth of writing and changing and delaying a sequel originally meant for high schools, Bring Back Birdie was still not ready for Broadway. And both Strouse and Stewart weren’t even there, due to their own aversions to opening nights. Stewart typically books a cruise ship to get out of town, and Strouse just avoids the night altogether, which was probably for the best. Because while a few critics tried to be kind and gave some praise to the performances, especailly Rivera and Forestieri, ultimately, every critic, including Frank Rich of the New York Times, took off the gloves and didn’t hold back:

“Bring Back Birdie is not only far inferior to its predecessor, but it is also woefully tired - as if everyone involved had abandoned hope … Bring Back Birdie, which begins as an amiable shambles, devolves into total chaos. Mr. Stewart unleashes a slew of confused, satirically toothless subplots … By the end, the show has run off in so many cryptic directions that you may think each member of the cast has been handed a different lousy script. The score that interrupts this book has a death wish … The titles and tunes may have changed, but you'll find flat retreads of old favorites … Although Mr. Strouse has come up with a few sprightly melodies, it hardly matters … The whole production is weak … Even David Mitchell, the inspired designer of Annie and Barnum, has gone haywire here. His scenery is built around a multitude of television sets - a mild satirical notion that's so overdone the show looks like a discount appliance outlet … Though Bring Back Birdie aspires to bring back everyone's happy youth, it has sent its creators and audience alike crashing into a gloomy middle age.”

The audience also had no patience for what they saw onstage. That same 'Filth' number that had turned an excited first-preview crowd into boos back in January hadn't won anyone over in the weeks since. Whatever goodwill the show might have hoped to build by opening night, that one number was certainly chipping away at it. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the cast to summon the courage to keep going out there, night after night, into that kind of response.

Jeb Brown: “As an actor, you do have to believe in the thing, you know, right up until the very last minute. So you find something to hang on to and to hold on to, and even as the ship is going down, you're hoping maybe they'll get it together, you know, we definitely believed.”

But on the morning of March 7, the producers stopped believing and announced the show would close that night after just 4 performances. And O’Connor was done as well, he simply didn’t care anymore. Theater historian Ken Mendelbaum says at one of the last performances, O'Connor forgot the words to a song aptly titled `Middle-Aged Blues,' and asked the orchestra pit for help, but then said, “You sing it. I hated this song anyway,” and walked off the stage. The audience was stunned, well, what little audience there was.

Mendelbaum would go on to say that Bring Back Birdie "may rank as the worst Broadway musical ever to be created by top-level professionals.” And yet, three months later, surprisingly Chita Rivera was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress as well as a Drama Desk Award.…after only four performances. I mean she didn’t win either of them, of course, but somehow she rose above the mess that surrounded her on the Beck stage those three days in March.

It is truly hard to believe a show could be that bad, yet have so many talented people involved. Once again illustrating how hard it is to create a sequel to an already successful musical. But the thing is, despite the Broadway catastrophe, in the end, it was just a very expensive one-year detour on the way to where it should have been all along: an amateur musical sequel licensed through Tams-Witmark, which was acquired by Concord Theatricals in 2018. Both Birdies are still available today for schools and community theaters, and as of this recording, Bye Bye Birdie has 30 productions coming up next year, while its sequel has none.

In fact, in the 45 years since it closed, I could only find on attempt to bring the show back in front of an audience, and that was a single concert in 2017 at Feinstein's/54 Below in NYC. That evening, the two Strouse and Adams songs cut by Layton before opening were actually added back into this concert presentation. But still, one night in nearly half a century hardly counts as a comeback. So it seems just like it was in 1981, no one wants to Bring Back Birdie.

Bonus Strouse & Adams Segment:

Strouse: “Mike Stewart is so frightened of anybody criticizing, seeing him, talking to him, touching him during the creative process or the end process, that he always books himself on a ship opening night. (Adams: “He wouldn't fly.”) He doesn't fly. He's afraid of that too. But he was so afraid of anything that he is on shipboard the night we open. Always been during our association. And as a matter of fact, Lee, who's a great joker, when we were writing Birdie together, we were sitting in the cab and Lee said, "Would you like to hear my Tony acceptance speech?" And Mike said, who is superstitious on top of it all, “Stop!" And Lee said, "Well, here it goes, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Michael Stewart and Charles Strouse and myself, I'd like to thank the Antoinette--" At which point we were going through traffic, but we were only going maybe 20 or 15 miles an hour. He opened the door of the cab and jumped out. He could not stand it.”