The Bye Bye Birdie songwriters are in their 90s and still best friends

Lee Adams, the 99-year-old lyricist of “Bye Bye Birdie,” doesn’t remember much about creating the show in 1960, but he can quote the New York Times review that came out during the opening night festivities: “‘Bye Bye Birdie’ is neither fish, fowl nor good musical comedy.”

“He simply did not get it,” Adams says, adding, “That was the kiss of death. And he was the number one reviewer. Then the other reviews started to come in. They all were positive. … And so by the end of the evening, we had a hit.”

Composer Charles Strouse, now 95, wrote in his 2008 memoir that as the review was read aloud at a post-show party, he excused himself, went to the men’s room and passed out. Adams found him on the tile floor.

“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.

The pair met at a mutual friend’s Christmas party in 1949 and began writing songs for revues. A producer saw their work and suggested an idea for a “happy teenage musical with a difference,” called “Let’s Go Steady.” Adams and book writer Michael Stewart brainstormed the idea of an Elvis-type character arriving in a small Ohio town.

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“I thought the idolatry that went with him was over the top and kind of silly. I mean, Elvis Presley as a great hero in America? I’m sorry, I don’t buy it,” Adams says.

As he wrote the music for “Bye Bye Birdie,” Strouse, who was a protégé of Aaron Copland and Frank Loesser, mimicked not only the sounds of Elvis but also Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and Annette Funicello. The show that’s been dubbed Broadway’s first rock musical was a satire of rock music, spoofing the genre in “One Last Kiss” and “Honestly Sincere.”

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.” (This from the man whose most famous lyric is “Gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face.”)

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The director of the Kennedy Center production, Marc Bruni, says the show is “underrated” in part because it rarely gets an A-list cast that can pull off the comedy. As with many classic musicals, the revival has had to remove lines that have “a little bit of an ick factor looking at it from a contemporary lens,” he says, like those that might be considered racially insensitive. It’s cast Conrad with a Black actor (Ephraim Sykes), which allows it to nod not just to Elvis but also to his lesser-known predecessors, Bruni notes.

But he believes in the show’s original vision, and the timelessness of its themes of celebrity worship and generational divides. “We’re not doing a version that’s in any way sending it up,” he says. “We’re allowing for it to be this kind of nugget of musical comedy joy.”

Strouse and Adams subsequently found other joys, writing the musicals “Golden Boy” starring Sammy Davis Jr., which ran 568 performances, and “Applause” starring Lauren Bacall, based on “All About Eve,” which ran 896. (Strouse would also write “Annie,” with lyricist Martin Charnin.) When Norman Lear hired the pair to write the “All in the Family” theme song, the limited budget made it hard to create full orchestrations, so Strouse decided to have the main couple sit at the piano — inspired by the show’s title, and his own pianist mother.

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In his memoir, Strouse portrayed Adams as a serene presence and himself as an anxious one — he calls composing “frightening.” They had tried and failed to write a “Bye Bye Birdie” title song for the Broadway version, but when the studio offered lots of money for them to do it for the movie, they reported to the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Lee and I walked into heaven,” Strouse says now. Still, he adds, “We had a lot of trouble writing that because it’s a silly song.”

They churned out something, despite Strouse’s writers-block demons. “Thank God for Lee,” Strouse wrote in his memoir. “He’d taken out his new pencil and pad, so I knew something good would happen. Lee was always there for me.” Sung by Ann-Margret, the song helped make the movie popular.

“Lee is the calmer person,” Strouse says now. “And at 4:30, he would say, ‘I’m going to go home’” — in part because he was married first. “I felt he was treasonous by getting married. But we had the usual feelings together of collaborators, which is they hated each other and they loved each other, and I still feel that way about Lee: I love him and sometimes he’s so irritating, et cetera, et cetera, and it makes a good collaboration.”

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Strouse has lived in Manhattan all his life. Adams used to live there but moved to the suburbs in 2007. Now he’s in Ossining, N.Y., where the buildings he sees from his porch remind him of Ohio — the town of Mansfield, where he’s from, and the town of Sweet Apple in “Bye Bye Birdie.” Strouse recently saw a college version, and last year Adams visited students rehearsing the show at nearby Sleepy Hollow High School.

They still talk on the phone, and they’re going to see the Kennedy Center production together. “Charles always says, ‘Let’s get together and write something,” says Adams. “And I say, ‘I’m retired.’”

If you go

Bye Bye Birdie

Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org.

Dates: June 7-15.

Prices: $59-$299.

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