When showbiz got down to business
The mid-20th century was the heyday of corporate American consumerism, when, after a decade and a half of the Great Depression and World War II, the American middle class arose with a new burst of enthusiasm and economic power. Never was there a better time to be a salesman than the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
Once a year, these salesmen (and they were overwhelmingly men) gathered for days of meetings and instructional presentations, and at night they were treated to lavish musicals by Broadway professionals — sometimes by famous people — that were meant not only to entertain, but also to serve as a pep rally for being the best salesman you could be.
“Bathtubs Over Broadway” rediscovers the forgotten world of industrial musicals through rare recordings and film clips, and it is as smoothly entertaining as a showbiz set piece, and at times flat-out funny.
The documentary, directed by Dava Whisenant, centers on Steve Young, not the ex-49ers quarterback but a longtime writer for David Letterman, the former latenight host who also appears and is executive producer. Young is a collector of this material who takes them seriously; he is legitimately awed by the talent behind them.
A clip from 1965 shows Ed McMahon hosting a Citgo musical number set to “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (“Everything’s Coming Up Citgo!”) A 1989 Ragu convention has a catchy original tune, with singers in medieval costumes: “We’re gonna show the world just whosa da boss/ Across the land there’s a cry for new sauce! (The sauce! The sauce!).”
Tony Randall put on a Hardee’s show in 1980s, and McDonald’s and Burger King commissioned their own musicals as well. There were shows put on by air conditioner companies and Detroit’s big automakers, and songs that pushed plastic wraps for butchers, Champion spark plugs, floor tiles, car key blanks — the list seems endless.
“We traveled all over. Great hotels, great salary. It was a dream job,” says Martin Short, who worked for a Chrysler convention.
Young finds former performers and songwriters from those corporate musicals — some famous, such as Florence Henderson and Chita Rivera — and others who toiled away at corporate musicals as a valuable supplement to their income.
One unsung hero is Hank Beebe, a prolific off-Broadway musical writer who became an industrial musical regular.
“They spent a lot of money,” says Beebe, whose catchy “Diesel Dazzle” for General Motors’ 1966 Detroit Diesel division show is included in the film. “The first Chevrolet show I did, the budget for that was $3 million. Compare that, for instance, for it what it cost to put ‘My Fair Lady’ on that same month in 1956, which was $446,000.”
But the Holy Grail of the industrial musical genre is, for Young, “The Bathrooms Are Coming,” a 1969 production for a company that specialized in bathroom fixtures, with the unforgettable song “My Bathroom”: “My Bathroom. My Bathroom! Is a private kind of place. It’s my very special room … Now I’m free, I’m free — I can really be free.”
The singer is Patt Stanton Gjonola. Forty-five years later, Young gets Stanton Gjonola to sing the song in person. For him, it’s like a private audience with Streisand.