Bathtubs Over Broadway is a documentary that sells itself immediately with its description. While working as a writer on The Late Show with David Letterman, Steve Young stumbles upon recordings of musicals with the names of some of America’s most recognisable brands, Ford, DuPont, GE, Xerox – all of them marked: “internal use only”.
What Steve Young had found were cast recordings of Broadway-style shows put on by these grand organisations as yearly events for their staff. They never been seen outside their respective organisations. Steve Young had stumbled into the world of the “industrial musical“.
Bathtubs Over Broadway follows Steve Young’s obsessive quest to find as many of these industrial musical recordings as he can and introduces us to many of the characters and personalities he meets along the way.
Bathtubs Over Broadway is a fun and light-hearted look into a world that very few people knew about, and yet, at its peak, was a regular enough occurrence that many actors and song writers were able to make the industrial musical circuit their livelihood.
“If you could be in four ‘industrials’ in a year, you could survive in New York”
Susan Stroman, Bathtubs Over Broadway
Steve Young himself is a great character in the documentary. His eagerness to collect and catalogue these recordings makes him particularly endearing, as he tries to find that one last copy of “The Bathrooms Are Coming!” or “Ford-i-fy Your Future”. There is joy in his search, a real sense of anticipation, that this next box of vinyl records may have the one he’s been looking for.
Seeing Young get excited at meeting songwriters Sid Siegel and Hank Beebe, or performers Patt Stanton Gjonola and Sandra Geller is infectious, especially since, for the most part, no one else recognises those names. To Young, those names are his stars, names he’s read on the backs of album covers for years, but never in his wildest dreams did he think he’d ever meet.
Bathtubs Over Broadway is a great documentary about a little unknown thing. It isn’t about a world changing event or product, it isn’t about some miraculous individual who achieved great things. It’s about a man, on a quest to find out as much as he can about a little thing that had piqued his curiosity and brought him joy. Which in itself makes for a joyous experience.
Bathtubs Over Broadway
87 minutes
Director: Dava Whisenant
Writers: Ozzy Inguanzo and Dava Whisenant
Cast: Steve Young, David Letterman, Martin Short, Florence Henderson, Susan Stroman, Jello Biafra, Hank Beebe, and Sid Siegel
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