“The Lost World of Industrial Musicals” – celebrating the little-known genre of internal corporate musical propaganda – is coming to Seattle on Thursday, July 21.Â
Steve Young, author/collector/historian and former “Letterman” writer, hosts this hilarious evening of startling entertainment featuring lost gems like GE’s “Silicones, Silicones” and American-Standard’s “My Bathroom.”
The one-night-only show takes place Thursday, July 21, at 7 p.m. at the Grand Illusion Cinema (1403 NE 50th Street, Seattle).
Tickets are just $12, and be ordered online here.
The show is an outgrowth of “Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals,” the book co-authored by Steve Young. From roughly the 1950’s to the 1980’s, corporate America commissioned tremendous numbers of lavish Broadway-style shows for conventions and sales meetings, not open to the public. This mutant showbiz genre was all but unknown until Steve began collecting the rare souvenir albums while gathering material for the “Dave’s Record Collection” segment on the Letterman show. Twenty years and one book later, he owns hundreds of scarce records and has met and interviewed many veterans of the industrial musical scene. And now, the next frontier: industrial musicals on film.
Among the excruciatingly rare films Steve Young will present, which can be seen nowhere else:
- A 1965 Citgo convention musical medley with a celebrity host
- A 1967 Purina dog food song and dance stage show
- A 1973 General Electric film using songs to promote the industrial uses of silicones
- A 1970 Hamm’s beer sales meeting film animated by Hanna-Barbera
- And the crown jewel: the film version of the legendary 1969 American-Standard distributor musical, “The Bathrooms Are Coming”!
