Industrial musical

The earliest known industrial musicals were produced by retail and automotive companies such as Ford, General Motors, and the Marshall Field's chain of department stores.

The pay was very good, the task was challenging, and from the theatre's point of view, the production costs were much higher than a regular Broadway musical.

Composer Hank Beebe estimates that the 1957 Chevrolet musical was budgeted at over 3 million dollars (U.S.), because it cost six times the amount it took to bring My Fair Lady to the stage that same year.

[2] Jonathan Ward, a writer and DJ who collects industrial musical albums, theorizes that the reason for the decline was partially due to rising production costs for stage shows, and the availability of low-cost video and multimedia technology.

Their team, led by producer Dale T. Hardin, director Craig Schaefer, and composer/lyricist Michael Reno created dozens of Shaklee Shows from concept to performance, and eventually branched out into in-house satellite TV.

In 2013, the first book on the history of industrial musicals, titled Everything's Coming Up Profits, was published, written by Steve Young and Mike "Sport" Murphy.

[5] In 2018, Bathtubs Over Broadway, a documentary on industrial musicals and Steve Young's quest to discover their creators, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

[6] The fourth episode of the fifth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel involves the title character being cast in a fictional industrial musical about waste management.