WAY OFF BROADWAY: A Star Is Born

There is no plot to speak of. The songs are derivative, and the star is a talking 1960 model automobile without driver that revs its engine and blows its horn at the sight of a pretty girl. The show has all the aroma of an hour-and-a-quarter commercial. In fact, that is precisely what it is. But by the time it finishes its 48-day, eight-city, coast-to-coast tour next month, Buick ’60, Buick’s slick, sales-gimmick musical, will have run up a road record that few Broadway hits can approach: almost every performance a hot-ticket, S.R.O. sellout.

Ballet on Skates. Polished as any professional production. Buick ’60 is not overburdened with appeal for anyone but Buick salesmen and prospective Buick buyers. It is not meant to be. The admen who put it on have only one object—to kick off the new models with as much razzmatazz as $500,000 can buy. Four cars, manned by formation-driving chorus boys, run through an elephantine ballet as chorus girls dance an accompaniment on foot and on roller skates. And the songs are enough to make even Tin Pan Alley blush: / Could Have Danced All Night comes out: “Electra too, with colors new and thrilling—the richest fabrics you can see …” The sell is so hard that it gongs like boiler plate. But it gets results. Salesmen and their quarry pack the house.

The big-budget industrial musical is nothing new. Chevrolet pioneered the idea nearly three decades ago, was soon followed by the rest of the industry—plus Coca-Cola, Westinghouse, General Electric, and dozens of other big firms that knew a good idea when they saw one. Seldom was the approach consistent: some companies concentrated on the soft sell, others pitched high and hard. Last season’s Oldsmobile take-off on Broadway’s Good News was the gentlest of kisses—and entertaining theater to boot. The songs were subtle, the plot made humorous sense, the verve of the Broadway original was still there. But this year’s trend, possibly reflecting tougher competition, is more toward the hard sell. The 1960 Olds version, like the Buick show, hollers sell from introduction to finale. Both this year and last, its choreography was handled by Carol (Pajama Game) Haney; this year, as last, its stars are Bill (Me and Juliet) Hayes and Florence (Fanny) Henderson. It races along like a hot rod, but every other line and every song is part of the sales spiel. The title: Got Rhythm. The message: “I got beauty! I got styling! I got sweet lines.” “The car,” intones D. P. Brother ad agency Vice President Frank Egan, “is, of course, the real star of the show.”

Twists in the Tongue. The switch from soft to hard may have eliminated whatever resembled real theater in the shows. But theater folk still view the industrial musicals with genuine affection. “Industrials have opened a new world for some of us,” says Buick Star Cathryn Damon. “It’s a challenge.” Explains Buick Showgirl Marianne Olsen: “You have to be more versatile than in the theater. Here you have to do everything—sing, dance, roller-skate.” The versatility bit can be troublesome at times, when the girls have to get around such tongue twisters as “torque tube” and “turbine drive transmission” in the lyrics. And on the road the troupers have to dance in places “where the floor is so bad, if one girl jumps to one side, you pop up on the other side.”

Yet for all their problems, the industrials have an overwhelming compensation: the pay (averaging $180 per week minimum for a chorus girl) is top scale, and the contracts cover a specified run. The actors respond with such enthusiasm that sometimes they fall for their own sales pitch. “A couple of years ago,” says Dancer Olsen, “I did the Buick show, and my husband did the Chevy show. When we needed a car, we started arguing over which was best. All of a sudden we realized what we were doing, and we darn near had hysterics over it.”