The show's lyricist, Lee Adams (who made that bad "gray skies" call), and its composer, Charles Strouse, participated in the ribbon-cutting — as creators, along with book writer Michael Stewart — of the theatre's re-opening act.

Poised with scissors were Bank of America officials and assorted moneybags, who rebuilt the theatre around its original 1918 façade. Also present were Roundabout Theatre Company artistic director Todd Haimes and Hizzoner Himself, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, successfully resisting the urge to break into song.

The distance between Sweet Apple, OH (where Birdie is set) and Urinetown (the last show to inhabit that theatre) is three days short of four years and ten months. Built in 1918, the theatre was named for an actor-manager of that World War I vintage (not, as you might have imagined, the controversial author of Tropic of Cancer). Over the years, it has been known variously as the Park-Miller (a movie house), the Avon-on-the-Hudson (an X-rated movie house), Xenon (a disco) and the Kit Kat Klub (for Roundabout's environmentally correct Cabaret). In 1998, it reverted to its original handle, Henry Miller's Theatre.

The historical (or, at least, hysterical) reference point for Birdie is Elvis Presley's 1958 induction into the U.S. Army, long hair and all, at the height of his fame — and the "Girls! Girls! Girls!" he left behind. Ironically, it was through this event that Presley would meet his one and only wife, but it takes half a century of dust-settling to see this. At the time, a world of petticoat camp-followers was up in arms.

John Stamos, who has his heartthrob following, does not play Conrad Birdie, the boot camp-bound rock star. Nolan Gerard Funk does. Rather, Stamos is Birdie's songwriter and manager, Albert Peterson, and he nerds himself up with thick black horn-rims and a lily-livered way with the ladies — in particular, his domineering mama Mae (Jayne Houdyshell) and his altar-angling secretary, Rose Alvarez (Gina Gershon). Albert's brainstorm is to dash off a going-away ditty for Birdie, "One Last Kiss," and have him plant it on a representative, middle-class Everygirl fan, smack-dab on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Enter Sweet Apple's own Kim MacAfee (Allie Trimm)—replete with plot-thicking boyfriend (Matt Doyle) and family loons (Bill Irwin, Dee Hoty, Jake Evan Schwencke), and we're more or less off to the races.

The opening-night party sprawled all over the vast underground Hard Rock Café a block west on 43rd Street from the equally cavernous new theatre. Had guests pressed on another block and over one, they could have seen the original Rose Alvarez (Chita Rivera, a spirited 76), knocking 'em dead at Roseland.

Specialties of the house at the Hard Rock Café were cutely cued by the show we had just seen: "Sweet Apple-Tini" (i.e., apple sparkling juice and vodka) and "One Last Kiss" (pomegranate specialty juice, mandarin orange blossom and vodka).

The cast, from lesser names to leads, did their press interviews before entering the dining area, and a full complement of reporters was on hand to catch the utterings.

"Playbill's been pretty damn good to us," Stamos said, warming to my credentials. "They ran the pictures, they did the nice story, they did a nice color ad for us, and my favorite thing is: I have in my dressing room a blown-up Playbill of the original Bye Bye Birdie. Chita Rivera signed it and kissed it with her lip-prints, and Dick Van Dyke wrote on it, 'Show 'em the moves, Stamos.'"

Rivera had arranged the autograph of the original Albert for Stamos. "I love Dick Van Dyke," he said quite admiringly. "I never saw him do it except for the movie, and that was so different from the play. The character of Albert has that thing that makes people smile, and I hope I have that. That's all I really can do, is make people smile."

View the Entire Photo Gallery Gina Gershon and John Stamos Photo by Aubrey Reuben

This is Stamos' fourth time on Broadway — and his first time to originate a role from the ground up. (He replaced in How to Succeed in Business, Cabaret and Nine.) "When I came in before, those shows were already up and going and going at full speed, and they sorta propped me up into it. Originating a part is much, much harder. It sure is. It's a whole machine that you have to activate."

Gershon echoed the same sentiments when she arrived—last—looking ravishing in a fetching black outfit with roses in her hair. "Yes, they're Spanish roses," she replied to the obvious. "I always like to dress Spanish. It's, like, my secret fetish, and tonight I thought I could actually go out as Spanish Rose" [her big number].

"Opening a musical on Broadway is trying—you try something, then change it and try something else. It's really a lot of cutting and pasting and changing. It hasn't been as easy as it was when I did it at Parkman Junior High. Bye Bye Birdie was the first musical I had ever done. Actually, I was 14, and turned 15 a week later."

In exactly the same boat — in '09 — is the show's Kim MacAfee, 14-going-on-15 (come Oct. 27.) When she was 13, she was in 13, playing Patrice the Geek. Now she's filling a role made famous by Susan Watson on stage and Ann-Margret on film. It's a head spin. "I'm having an amazing time," she said. "I love the cast I'm working with. It's like a big family, and I'm enjoying every minute of it."

Hoty, who plays her mom, has her own mother in mind for this show: "She reminds me of my mother," the actress admitted. "I look like my mother. She used to wear her hair like this. She wore these kinds of clothes. My mother didn't wear as many crinolines, but I remember her dressing like this. So it's like a childhood homage."

The most formidable mother on that stage is Albert's smothering one—a fur-coated matriarch whose apron strings are stainless steel. "It's a beautiful role," said Houdyshell, relaxing in one of the back booths with the two women who helped her get a Tony nomination (for Well): writer/co-star Lisa Kron and director Leigh Silverman. "I am following some great ladies in this part—my God, the greatest ladies. It's a little daunting." She missed the original, Kay Medford, but she saw Maureen Stapleton in the film and Tyne Daly on TV.

Tony winner Irwin has the unenviable job of following Paul Lynde at his zaniest in the role that established his career: "I saw him do the movie, and I heard him on the record—and it is very hard to get his voice out of your mind when you first look at those lines of dialogue. But he's got very big shoes, and I'm not going to try to fill them directly. I'm just going to try to salute him by taking another angle."

He appreciated the smooth-sailing of opening night. "I had a good time tonight because everything went as it was supposed to, unlike the previous night. Actually, last night was great fun, too. Stamos kept the audience alive for the 12 minutes it took to fix the system. We were ever so hopeful that Don Rickles would come up on stage, but we didn't manage to get him over the orchestra pit and up there."

Robert Longbottom, who directed and choreographed Birdie, is also doing those same two chores—simultaneously—for Dreamgirls, which starts previews Nov. 6 at The Apollo for a Nov. 22 opening and a year-long tour.

How does he do two things at once? "I have a lot of help, and I'm very organized," he said. It helps that he had an out-of-town tryout of Dreamgirls—way out of town, in Korea—"so I have a formula for the show, with a brand-new African-American cast."

Longbottom has made quite a few alterations in the original text. "The first act wasn't touched, not a word of it," he quickly pointed out. "The second act—I wasn't crazy about the way one thing flowed to the next. Nor were Charles and Lee, so we all put our heads together and looked for ways to make it a little more cinematic. "We found a better place to put 'Kids,' and I got rid of the Shriner's Ballet, which I had no interest in doing. It was [the original director] Gower Champion's number. It had nothing to do with the plot. It forwarded the plot nowhere. I didn't really want my leading lady on her knees underneath a table, actually. Which is exactly what that was. I didn't quite get that. I'm sure it was fabulous, but it wasn't for me."

Composer Strouse and Adams added two songs to their Birdie score after the Broadway run. One, written for the road-company revival with Tommy Tune and Ann Reinking—"A Mother Doesn't Matter Anymore"—gave Marilyn Cooper one of her last showstoppers. (The comedienne died last April 23 and will be remembered in a memorial service Oct. 22 in Sardi's Eugenia Room.)

The other, recalled Strouse, was for the 1963 movie. "They flew us out to California. It was a typical Hollywood junket. We stayed at the best hotel, and all we did was wait at the swimming pool. They paid us what I thought was a great deal of money at the time, aside from buying the film, because they wanted us to write a title song for Ann-Margret, whom we didn't even think was right for the role at all—and she ended up being the hit of the film."

Which may explain why Charles Strouse is a great songwriter and not a producer.

The most surprising first-nighter was Dean Stolber, the original Harvey Johnson, the voice-cracking gentleman caller in "The Telephone Hour" number. "I know that Elliot Lawrence, who was the original musical director, is here tonight," he announced after searching the house for old friends. "I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Stolber turned out better than the unpromising adolescent he played: "I run MGM On Stage. It's the division that deals with taking the MGM film titles and licensing them for the stage. We've had Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, we've had Legally Blonde, we have Minsky's [by Strouse and Susan Birkenhead], which is on the way, we have Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which was in Australia and is now running in London and is coming to Toronto. I come up with the idea and find the producers and the talent to put them on, so I've kept my hand in the theatre."

Graham Phillips, now of TV's "The Good Wife," attended the opening as a show of support for his pals from 13. In addition to Trimm, that includes Brynn Williams and Riley Costello. "I thought they all did great."

Michael Mayer, the Tony-winning director of Spring Awakening, was still wearing a Cheshire-cat smile over the success his Green Day musical, American Idiot, which lifted off with much noise last week at Berkeley Repertory: "It went really great. We extended again, so it will be through Nov. 15. I'm going back out there for the last two weeks, maybe do a little more work. And then we hope, y'know, for a future for it . . ." A future, like maybe a Fall Awakening, one is tempted to ask? "I'd be very happy if that happened. A lot of it is about real estate more than anything, so that remains to be seen. We need the right theatre at the right time. I believe things happen when they're meant to, so I'm not pushing one way or another."

Marilyn Maye, who has two more nights to go on her current gig at The Metropolitan Room, remembered fondly the original Birdie. "When I was recording in New York, I caught it. It was so much fun." And she had no problem identifying her favorite song: "'Put On a Happy Face'—I put it on my first album."

While Jan Maxwell is at play with The Royal Family, her husband, actor Robert Emmet Lunney, said he has drummed up a little work for himself as a director: "I'm going to direct something in connection with the international celebration of playwright Howard Barker, and it's going to be at Drama Book Shop, with Jefferson Mays in the cast. It's a piece called Pity in History Oct. 23. It was a teleplay, broadcast in 1984, and I think it works on stage."

Other first-nighters included Howard Stern, the book-writers of the last two shows to play the Miller (Cabaret's Joe Masteroff and Urinetown's Greg Kotis), composer Robert Lopez and his lyricist-wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, a bewhiskered Boyd Gaines ("I'm recording a long book—The Clinton Tapes—and I don't want to shave"), the cast of Roundabout's The Understudy (Julie White, Justin Kirk and Mark-Paul Gosselaar), designers Willa Kim and Tony Walton, playwrights Christopher Shinn and Terrence McNally, Bryan Batt of "Mad Men," writer-directors Richard LaGravenese and Alex Timbers, Perrey Reeves (who plays Jeremy Piven's wife on "Entourage"—you remember Jeremy Piven), Kyle MacLachlan, Jim Dale (who tried out his new one-man show in Connecticut), John Weidman, radio's Joan Hamburg,The Public's Oskar Eustis, the designer and composer of next month's Apollo-bound Dreamgirls (William Ivey Long and Henry Krieger), Birdie's orchestrator and lighting designer (Jonathan Tunick and Ken Billington), director-choreographers Kathleen Marshall and Rob Ashford, Speech & Debate playwright Stephen Karam and Stephanie March.