The fellow above in David Letterman's guest chair is Steve Young, who for a long time — right up until the end of The Late Show with David Letterman — was one of Dave's best writers. One of Steve's lesser duties for a time was to assemble a recurring segment called "Dave's Record Collection" in which the host would play snippets of very bizarre record albums.
Steve diligently searched for odd albums. He even phoned me once but all the really strange ones in my collection were already in his. But he found lots of great material elsewhere and much of it was in the category of Industrial Musicals. What the heck is an industrial musical? Here's an explanation purloined from a website set up to promote Everything's Coming Up Profits, a book Steve co-authored on the subject…
Once upon a time, when American industry ruled the earth, business and Broadway had a baby. This mutant offspring, glimpsed only at conventions and sales meetings, was the industrial musical. Think Broadway show, except the audience is managers and salesmen, and the songs are about how great it is to be working at the company.
Through the rare souvenir record albums presented in Everything's Coming Up Profits, an alternate show-biz universe emerges: a universe in which musical theater can be about selling silicone products, or typewriters, or insurance, or bathtubs. Some of these improbable shows were hilariously lame. Some were pretty good. And some were flat-out fantastic.
The secret to the best industrial musicals seems to be that sometimes, the company would say "Spare no expense" and they'd splurge for (and pay well) directors, performers, writers, composers, designers, choreographers, etc. Some really good people worked on them — folks like John Kander and Fred Ebb or Sheldon Harnick, who went on to write huge Broadway hits — and sometimes, it would be people who didn't do much if any work on mainstream Broadway, in part because they were busy writing musicals about tractors or drill presses.
Last night, my friend Tracy Abbott insisted I go with her, her husband Charlie and her son Jack to the Writers Guild screening of Bathtubs Over Broadway, a new documentary about industrial musicals and about Steve Young's obsession with them. Tracy has known Steve since she too was a writer for Letterman. (Quick Aside: There have been a number of articles complaining about how few female writers Dave employed. Every single one I've seen has omitted any mention of Tracy, which is a strange error to make when you're complaining about female writers being disrespected. Tracy later wrote for Jay Leno, thereby becoming the first female writer to work for any incarnation of The Tonight Show. And she doesn't get mentioned in articles complaining about how few there were on that show, either.)
Anyway, we had a great time. The film was directed and co-written by Dava Whisenant and co-written by Ozzy Inguanzo, who sat for a Q-and-A afterwards. They explained how they didn't set out to make the film as much about Steve but that was the direction in which things just naturally went. It's about Steve in the final days of his long career with David Letterman and about Steve's quest to track down recordings of industrial musicals and also folks who worked on them. (Letterman, by the way, appears briefly and unbearded in the film, and is credited as an Executive Producer.)
Steve locates and becomes friends with Sol Siegel and Hank Beebe, who were kind of like the Jerome Robbins and Irving Berlin of industrial musicals. But imagine if you will, spending months writing a musical but instead of doing it for (you hope) a long, long run on Broadway, touring companies and maybe a movie deal, you're doing it for one or two performances in a hotel ballroom somewhere. There is no visible chance of it ever being more than that.
Most Broadway composers have nightmares about the reviewers panning their work and then the show closes in one night as a humiliating flop. Industrial musicals don't get reviewed and most are supposed to close in one night. It's quite a different world, though with just enough similarities to the mainstream one…and of course, a lot of the stuff is hilarious because of its subject matter and commercial messages. You can hear some songs from industrial musicals on this page. I'd recommend "My Bathroom," which is heard throughout Bathtubs Over Broadway.
Better still, I'd recommend going to see Bathtubs Over Broadway, which is opening in selected theaters (that means "not very many") next week. You'll be intrigued about the world it introduces you to. You'll find Steve Young charming and funny. And you'll love meeting some of the people who worked on these lost musicals and hearing and seeing selections from them. Thank you, Tracy, for taking me to see this movie. It's an awful lot of fun.