Bathtubs Over Broadway – Netflix

Bathtubs Over Broadway – Netflix.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

It’s about 526,000 minutes since we last saw a live show on Broadway or in the West End but these lockdowns have given musical theatre aficionados plenty of time to trawl through the movie outlets we now have on TV in search of something a bit different.

Bathtubs Over Broadway – you can find it on Netflix – is not a bit different, it’s very different. It is a full-length documentary about industrial musicals. Heard of them? No, me neither. But stick with it – there is much to enjoy.

It has hoovered up many awards, 17 at the last count, and won Dava Whisenant the Best New Documentary director gong at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.

Industrials were ‘secret’ corporate musicals put together with lavish song and dance routines and a smattering of Broadway stars to entertain sales reps, shareholders and employees of big companies. They were usually performed internally only once or twice, then generally forgotten.

Money was no object. For The Chevy Show, car giants Chevrolet shelled out $3m on a one-off musical – six times the cost of launching My Fair Lady on Broadway – to spoil their employees in a very different era when folk dedicated their lives to one company.

Flourishing mainly between the 1950s and the 1970s and made to motivate/reward staff or to introduce new products to them, they were later put out on vinyl as souvenirs for those who attended, which is how many ended up in bargain-bin record stores.

The public was never meant to see them and when you hear the ridiculous ditties the poor singers and lyricists had to put across, it is easy to see why. But the money was good – actress Melody Rogers says that if you could get to do four a year, you could comfortably survive in New York.

And the shows had wonderful writers, performers and musicians. John Kander was involved, so were ace choreographer Susan Stroman and Sheldon Harnick of Fiddler On the Roof fame, while Broadway royalty Chita Rivera, Tony Randall and Martin Short were willing to stay in a luxury hotel and put “the dazzle into diesel”.

Stroman, later winner of five Tonys and two Olivier Awards, came up with some dancing beer cans, while in The Bathrooms Are Coming, Patt Stanton Gjonola sang about the room “where I wash and where I cream”, and 22 Slices Of Bread proffered the unforgettable line: “Wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat/It makes your life complete.”

But the market for this kind of batty Americana no longer exists although Walmart The Musical did surface in 2007. Half a century on, the world is a vastly different place.

If parodies of existing classics are your bag, there’s ‘Everything’s Coming Up CITGO’ for petrolheads and the Verdi-inspired ‘Raguletto’ for pasta sauce lovers. Dog chow, motion-activated faucets, sunscreens, 7-Up, baby powder, soap and all manner of cars … pretty well anything went in those musicals. No jingle is left unturned.

But let’s start at the beginning when we find Steve Young, a genial gag writer for The Late Show With David Letterman who is tasked with finding offbeat, obscure and inadvertently funny discs for the Dave’s Record Collection section of the TV show.

While ferreting around among the dusty vinyl in a bargain-bin record shop, he chances upon the Kander-inspired General Electrics album, an unreleased rarity, and in the next few years goes from mocking the genre to pure infatuation, devoting himself to tracking down still-alive cast and creatives and even writing a book about it, Everything’s Coming Up Profits.

He discovers “a world we never knew existed” and manages to interview Sid Siegel before he died. Siegel claimed to have composed 250 of these industrials, one of which was The Bathrooms Are Coming, and as the octogenarian plays piano, Young movingly sings his lyrics. Another composer, Hank Beebe, also has rich tales to tell.

The affable Young then traces some of the Bathroom stars and strikes gold when one of them, Gjonola, finds a 16mm recording of it gathering dust at home and the film ends with him and the cast, what’s left of them, joyously linking up as they sing out the show.

The soundtrack, released in 2019, has a score by Anthony DiLorenzo as well as original songs by Young. It’s a funny, sweet-natured, nostalgic gem guaranteed to cheer up (and educate) any deprived musical theatre fan… or anybody. The 2018 Tribeca jury called it “the most feel-good film event of the Festival”. They’re not wrong.

Jeremy Chapman