Bill Irwin Gets Serious About Musical Comedy in Bye Bye Birdie

About the author:
Tony Award winner Bill Irwin has done it all. He's a legit clown college graduate and beloved alum of The Pickle Family Circus. He has written, directed and starred on Broadway, occasionally doing all three at once, as in 1989's Largely New York. His screen work runs the gamut from Sesame Street to big screen dramas like Rachel's Getting Married. And he always finds time to return to the New York stage, as in last season's acclaimed Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot and 2005's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which earned him a Best Actor Tony Award. In fact, there's only one area that's new territory for Irwin: musicals. Currently exploring the musical landscape as Harry MacAfee in the Roundabout Theatre Company's starry Bye Bye Birdie revival, Irwin explains in this refreshingly honest essay what it's like to make the jump—and how the very skills that got him his new gig also present the greatest challenges.

From straight play to musical: What's the difference? If your world has been one, what different craft do you need to cross to the other? All through Bye Bye Birdie rehearsals I thought I was answering this question.

Then, as in every Broadway show—a musical, a play, anything—you enter the strange realm of tech rehearsal and hope to live through to the other side. We never really see the orchestra again; they're several feet down in the darkened pit. We hear them—and they just get better and better—and occasionally we get to do the songs with them in and around the working of light cues and scenic moves and the harsh new reality of costume changes.

Our director, Robert Longbottom, puts the vision he's been carrying in his head into motion. All of us have been nodding our heads through the rehearsal period, but now we see it fit together. It has taken something like the engineering genius of a NASA mission to do, and during a break I call him "Dr. Werner von Bobby," hoping it sounds like a compliment. Scenic pieces go on and off, the crew brings what usually takes 20 minutes down to 10 seconds, and then someone says, "We'll get that tighter." You learn where to stand to be out of the way. Everybody says, "We've got lots of time yet."

Then there's an audience. The sure jokes lie there lifeless, and the little incidental ones, the ones that always seemed like they should be cut, get huge laughs. The laughs are longer than you think in some places and shorter than you ever imagined in others. Then, it's time to sing "Kids."

We start right in the pocket, and I realize the song, and its laughs, are actually playing! I can hear some little laughs through the band's music. We get through to my favorite part, the melodic turnaround with the words "...and while we're on the subject: Kids!" There's a nice laugh—a big one—and I feel all, 'Well, I'm doing my job!' I play the laugh and go forward. Now [co-star] Dee Hoty's eyes are getting big and I notice that [musical director] David Holcenberg's smile is a little strained. We finish to moderate applause and exit.

Dee says to me in the wings, "You know you were behind... right?" I start to say to her that I certainly knew that something was off and that we really needed to talk to David, and that we really needed to talk to Bobby, and blah blah blah....But it's time to run to the next costume change.

It wasn't till two costume changes later that I suddenly realized what I'd done. The wardrobe ace, Joe Hickey, is getting a coat off of me with one hand and pointing to my shoes with the other hand to try to get me focused, but I just stopped and said, "Oh."

I'd had a public craft vs. instinct collision—and, as in most crucial moments in life, I'd returned to my roots. When the audience laughed I did what a comic actor does: I held for the laugh. I held, and I suppose I even invited the audience to let it roll a bit. I was doing my job as an actor (possibly feeling rather pleased with myself, the cardinal on-stage sin) and I followed an instinct not to kill a laugh. It never occurred to me to think of the musical train wreck implications of holding. Even as it was happening, I guess I was thinking "something's wrong here, but it can't be me..."

The next day's schedule showed "Kids" first up for rehearsal.