Documentary for Musical Lovers

[smofbabe]

Finally got to watch "Bathtubs Over Broadway" on US Netflix, a documentary by former Letterman writer and obsessed collector Steve Young about the heyday of musicals at industrial conferences in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which had budgets on the order of $3 million! People who worked on them include composer Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof), director and choreographer Susan Stroman (The Producers), and actors Tony Randall, Chita Rivera, Dom Deluise, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, and Florence Henderson. It includes, among other things, interviews with some of the participants and clips from a musical number extolling spark plugs, an opera number for Ragu spaghetti sauce called "Raguletto," and a Purina Dog Chow show with a woman in a short red-checked skirt and tight-fitting red sweater seductively singing about pet store profit margins to an enraptured store manager! To quote Young about a rare video of "The Bathrooms Are Coming" (for American Standard), "The usual adjectives of good and bad don't even apply any more."