A Musical Salute to Kitchen Appliances

The big news on Broadway in 1957 may have been West Side Story and The Music Man, but in Columbus, Ohio they were singing about kitchen appliances rather than Jets, Sharks or 76 trombones.

The occasion was the annual meeting of the Westinghouse dealers, and the centerpiece of their August gathering was a musical tribute to the new line of fridges, stoves and mixers, as documented in today's post, The Shape of Tomorrow: A Musical Introduction to 1958 Westinghouse Appliances, a souvenir LP from the meeting.

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The Shape of Tomorrow is one of the prime artifacts from the heyday of the industrial musical, designed to amuse attendees at boring meetings while creating enthusiasm for the sponsoring company and its product assortment. I've already posted a notable example - Once in a Lifetime: the Complete Musical Score from the Edsel Dealer Announcement Show, which dates from the same month as the Westinghouse production.

Green in G&S costume

If anything, the Westinghouse show was more elaborate than the Edsel spectacular. The large cast was led by Martyn Green, perhaps the most famous Gilbert & Sullivan specialist of the 20th century, who had moved to the U.S. after leaving D'Oyly Carte in 1951. The other performers are less noted, but their work is uniformly good.

The show has a fine score by John Wyman, of whom I can find no information, with lyrics by Herb Kanzell, an actor and writer who went on to do many such shows for clients including International Harvester, Dulux, British Rail, Oxo and British Airways. The BBC interviewed him as recently as 2012, but that clip is unfortunately not online.

Wyman and Kanzell concocted a variety of tunes, including a patter song for Green, "Nightmare," patterned after a G&S specialty, where his character has horrible dreams about unwashed dishes and similar domestic catastrophes that would ensue without Westinghouse appliances. My favorite is the calypso, "He Got No Westinghouse Franchise," where Green sings about war heroes such as Pershing, Eisenhower and Wellington, lamenting that "Him won the war but he got no store, and that's why the tears they dim his eyes. He got no Westinghouse franchise!"

Green is cast as J.W. Butterfield, Westinghouse dealer extraordinaire, who has a customer base so exclusive that "We only condescend to sell to upper-crusted clientele - and never the lowly bourgeoisie!" A man to emulate for the dealers in the audience, no doubt.

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The staging of the show was by Buff Shurr, who was in a few Broadway musicals and was to be assistant choreographer on The Roar of the Greasepaint. He eventually directed more than 150 industrial shows, for companies including RCA, GM, Ford, PepsiCo, Dr. Pepper and Frito Lay. As recently as last year he was associated with Garland Summer Musicals in Texas.

Besides Green, the best-known member of the troupe was orchestrator and conductor Ted Royal, one of the finest Broadway arrangers, whose credits include Brigadoon, Where's Charley?, House of Flowers, Flahooley and Mr. Wonderful.

Peter Muller-Monk

Why would Westinghouse spend so freely for this product introduction? It may have been because the new models represented a major change for their appliances. Styles had been modulating throughout the 1950s from the rounded moderne forms of the 1930s and 40s into the straight, clean modernist lines that had already influenced architecture, furniture and automobiles. Westinghouse's 1957 products had been stuck in the old style, so it was time to get in tune with the times.

The company hired Peter Muller-Monk, a Pittsburgh-based industrial designer, to remake the look of its products. Together they came up with The Shape of Tomorrow, a motto and symbol reminiscent of The Forward Look, which Chrysler and Virgil Exner had introduced a few years before. Muller-Monk was a talented designer; his work was an artistic success that wears its 60 years well. I've included an article on him in the download.

Unlike many promotional LPs, the sound from this example is very good.