Corporate America Sings - musical shows about company products - Brief Article

Brandweek, April 23, 2001 by Becky Ebenkamp

Life was clearly better in the 1960s. Take musicals for instance. While today's theatergoer must shell out $100 for the "pleasure" of seeing a Contact or Les Miz, those around in 1969 could enjoy a free performance of, say, The Bathrooms are Coming!

That is, if they were lucky enough to toil for a company that staged lavish corporate musicals. Also called industrial shows, these performances were designed to instill the workforce with pride, bravado and the motivation to go out there and sell, sell, sell!

"You could consider the industrial musical a corporate vanity project of sorts," said Jonathan Ward, a writer/DJ who owns over 100 rare records commemorating various performances. Companies that wanted to educate and motivate their sales forces would hire songwriters and composers to write musicals about their companies or products, then the show would be performed at an annual gathering or banquet. They were meant not only to entertain, but to [inspire] the workforce to make lots of money."

While conventions and corporate anthems existed in the decades prior, the full-blown industrial show didn't erupt until after World War II. Among the first to roll them out were car companies, which staged "announcement shows" with songs extolling the virtues of their latest models. This led to a Golden Age in the '60s, when everyone from Listerine to Royal Typewriter was singing its own praises. Sometimes, souvenir records would be pressed for attendees.

"Top-flight companies had the money to spend on original music and lyrics, and they used big, live orchestras and professional Broadway performers" said Steve Young, a writer for The Late Show With David Letterman whose oddball musical tastes are the fodder for the show segment and Web site Dave's Record Collection.

Plotlines could be hopelessly tired. In This Is Oldsmobility, a whiny salesman can't figure out how to sell the new line of cars, but a few songs later he's won the girl and his newly energized career couldn't be brighter. Variations on this theme appear in shows by Xerox, Volkswagen, Porsche and others, Ward said.

But some were more inspired. He points to The Great Life, a B.F. Goodrich musical about a man who makes a Faustian deal with the devil in order to sell more tires, and Got To Investigate Silicones, a 1973 musical by GE'S sealants division that "succeeds in the daunting task of listing literally hundreds of uses for silicones with considerable panache." (To learn some, refer to lyrics on page 24.)

Much like popular music's 'Fin Pan Alley industrial shows had a songwriting stable of sorts. Wilson Stone, Michael Brown, Ed Nayor and Hank Beebe & Bill Heyer had long, lucrative careers, Ward noted. Other musical mensches got their breaks or pocketed side money there: GE extravaganza Go Fly A Kite was written by John Kander and Fred Ebb of Cabaret and Chicago fame. Scheldon Hamick and Jerry Bock penned an ode to tractors, The Music from Ford-I- Fy Your Future ,then went on to write Fiddler On The Roof. The genre also garnered its share of performing talent: Bob Fosse, Hal linden, Loretta Swit, Florence Henderson and Valerie Harper can claim corporate musicals on their resumes.

All good things must come to an end, of course, and the decline of these earnest anthems about tractors, stoves and sales teams occurred in the '80s. "It was expensive," Young noted. "Eventually it seemed to give way to pre-recorded, reusable multimedia stuff."

Ward agreed, adding that the shows thrived at a time when people spent their lives working for one company "Such devotion is rare these days," he said. "I think that's one of the reasons the industrial musical died."