Comedy writer’s obsession with corporate musicals comes to CT

Steve Young is still amazed that Broadway-style musicals about household appliances, new motorcars or toilets even exist, let alone become a passion that’s consumed him for decades.

“It seems like something comedy writers must have made up,” he said.

Young is, in fact, a comedy writer. He made so-called “industrial musicals” a running gag on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” then became infatuated with the form. He wrote a book, “Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals” (currently out of print), then was the main subject of the 2018 documentary “Bathtubs Over Broadway” as a leading collector of films, recordings and other documentation of these shows.

Now, he’s bringing his love of this bizarre theatrical genre to the stage, hosting “The Weird and Wonderful World of Industrial Musicals.” The live presentation, which involves performance videos, recordings as well as stories about how the shows were made, can be seen Sunday at 7 p.m. and Monday at 2 p.m. at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford.

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Young, a Hartford native, wrote for David Letterman’s late-night show from 1990 to 2015, first when it was at NBC and then when it moved to CBS in 1993. “I was a jack of all trades on the show,” he said. “I ran the monologue, but it was kind of everybody doing everything.”

One of the regular routines he had a hand in was “Dave’s Record Collection,” where unusual recordings — often TV actors like Leonard Nimoy or Eddie Albert attempting to sing, or odd juxtapositions like “101 Strings Orchestra Play and Sing the Songs of the Beach Boys” — were played for the audience’s amusement. Most of the recordings were so odd that little or no commentary from Letterman was required.

So when Young began stumbling across LP soundtracks of full-blown Broadway-style musicals extolling the virtues of Oldsmobiles, Westinghouse appliances and American Standard toilets, he knew what to do with them. “It was right in the wheelhouse of what we did on the show.”

Then something changed. Beyond the mockery, the amusement and him just doing his job of finding funny things to put on television, Young found himself enjoying the shows, humming the songs and wanting to know more about them.

His infatuation is not far-fetched. The industrial musicals were big-budget affairs that enlisted major Broadway talents, among them the “Cabaret” and “Chicago” team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, “Fiddler on the Roof” composer Jerry Bock and electronic pop music pioneer Raymond Scott. The musicals were designed to entertain workers for major corporations at national conventions or trade shows, or as long-form advertisements for new product lines.

The intended audiences were not necessarily Broadway-savvy, which meant the shows’ creators had to work that much harder to bring their messages of corporate excitement across. Young admits that he “grew up knowing nothing about Broadway,” and had no idea who some of the famous writers and composers involved with the shows were. “The songs were just getting stuck in my head. At some point, it tipped over for me after I had half a dozen of these albums. It was not just for Letterman anymore,” he said.

“These shows felt so real. They were well-funded. They were oddly beautiful,” he added.

When he shares even the most egregious examples of the form, like “Here Come the Bathrooms,” Young says “audiences’ mouths are hanging open” in awe.

As he got more interested in industrial musicals, Young was able to talk to such talents as “Fiddler on the Roof” lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who died earlier this year. Harnick told Young that he enjoyed the challenge of writing the shows and that when his Broadway career started blossoming, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to keep doing the corporate shows.

The final season of the Amazon Prime sitcom “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” showed its heroine starring in a lavish industrial musical about waste disposal. Young says he heard the show’s writers consulted his book and Dava Whisenant’s “Bathrooms over Broadway” documentary when preparing those episodes.

Young likes the documentary partly because it wasn’t his idea to make it. He knew Whisenant from when she was an editor at the Letterman show, and she was the one who wanted to explore how he developed an interest in industrial musicals. “It’s more honest when the person it’s about isn’t the one making it,” he said.

Compared to the book and the documentary, Young said the live stage presentation is “a deep dive” into some of the material that is only partially covered elsewhere.

“There’s an assortment of vintage show clips you can’t see anywhere else,” he said. That includes a screening of the legendary 1969 American Standard musical extravaganza “The Bathrooms Are Coming.”

Young was born in Hartford “but I only lived there until I was 1. Then we moved to Bristol for a couple of years, then Massachusetts. Now I have a house in Torrington.”

This will be Young’s first visit to Playhouse on Park, but he suspects the vibe is just right for his presentation. “I love a venue which says ‘That looks interesting. We know our audiences will want to see this.’”

Besides a full season of plays and musicals, Playhouse on Park also offers a resident dance company, a monthly stand-up comedy series, homegrown burlesque shows and a variety of special events, but “The Weird and Wonderful World of Industrial Musicals” would be an unusual booking for any venue.

Young noted that a Hartford audience will particularly appreciate one musical that’s noted in his show called “My Insurance Man,” which was commissioned by the Continental Insurance Company, which was based in Connecticut for a time.

The Playhouse on Park appearance is the 12th stop on Young’s national tour. He’ll be revising the show for a different tour next year, which he said “will be more elaborate, with live singers.

“Until I began doing this, I was not a performer,” Young said. “It led to me doing my own music now. I found my little niche in life.”

“The Weird and Wonderful World of Industrial Musicals” has two performances, Sunday at 7 p.m. and Monday at 2 p.m. at Playhouse on Park, 244 Park Road, West Hartford. $20. playhouseonpark.org.