Hot Docs 2018 Review: Bathtubs Over Broadway

May 01, 2018- Permalink

Bathtubs Over Broadway

I had a chance to preview Dava Whisenant’s Bathtubs Over Broadway just before Hot Docs and the film premieres tonight at the Hart House Theatre. While doing research for a musical bit on The Late Show with David Letterman, writer Steve Young comes across a record of an industrial musical. What’s that you say? It turns out that for decades, companies would wine and dine their top salespeople from across the U.S. and then entertain them with elaborate song-and-dance numbers that sometimes had bigger budgets than Tony-winning Broadway musicals. Except instead of singing about a girl named Maria, or life being a cabaret, these show tunes extolled the virtues of sliced bread, toilets, ball bearings and industrial lubricants.

This is the sort of oddity Letterman loved and Young quickly became an avid collector of these recordings, which were not for public sale but rather given out as reminders of the conferences and conventions. Young discovers that talents like Martin Short and Chita Rivera performed in these shows and artists like choreographer Susan Stroman depended on the work to keep them afloat between Broadway shows. He seeks out the lesser known names that consistently wrote or performed in these shows and Bathtubs over Broadway gives them a chance to shine again. Young develops an affection for these shows that reflect a golden age of American manufacturing and a lost time when sales required working the feet or the phone to get the job done. Utterly charming, Bathtubs Over Broadway is a must-see.

For more information on the 2018 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and for tickets and showtimes visit hotdocs.ca.