Behind every glamorous profession, there are all sorts of less glamorous places to show off your talents while getting paid. In sports, you have minor leagues. Instea of teaching at Universities, professors might teach at community colleges, For every major Hollywood movie, there are dozens of straight to video/streaming movies. Before conquering Nashville, Shania Twain was a singer on a cruise line. Comedian Taylor Tomlinson spent years on the church circuit. These are places where you can make a good living with your talent, but few think of those as places to develop your skills or make a living while racing for your dreams.
But where do Broadway writers and performers go when Broadway hasn’t discovered them yet? Believe it not, for years they would go on the Industrial circuit. The Industrial circuit was the largely unknown musical theater performances for Corporate retreats. Large companies would fly all their managers or sales folks out for a week to talk about the upcoming year and part of the presentation was a musical written and performed specifically for their company. And there is a documentary about it currently streaming on Netflix.
Writer Steve Young spent 25 years writing for David Letterman. First on NBC and then following him over to CBS until Letterman retired. One of the recurring bits on Letterman was Dave’s Music Shelf. Young was a bit of a musician himself and took over the job of finding the weird and wacky albums for Dave to showcase and make jokes about. Along the way he started finding some weird albums that looked like cast recordings for Broadway musicals, but the topics were not the usual Broadway fare. Such as bathrooms
Or diesel engines
These shows were alternate avenues for performers and songwriters who were waiting for Broadway success. Songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote the music for the GE industrial musical Go Fly a Kite in 1966 right as they were working on their Broadway musical Cabaret, which won 8 Tonys the next year. Songwriters Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock worked on Industrial musicals before hitting it big on Broadway with Fiddler on the Roof. Performers who worked on Industrial musicals include Florence Henderson, Hal Lindon and Martin Short. And there was a lot of money spent on these shows. In the 1950s when it cost $500K to put My Fair Lady on Broadway, a Industrial show was rumored to have cost over $3M.
What this shows is that there are always alternatives to the big time. When Broadway wasn’t calling, these performers and songwriters did Industrial musicals as a way to use their artistic skills to make a living. And that’s something to remember. If you want to use your imagination and skills, there are always ways to do it. If you want to be creative, then be creative. Find a way to do it anyways.