I’d say that Hollywood is running out of ideas, but this seems like it could be either very good or very bad. Kristin Wiig and Will Ferrell have signed on to develop a musical based that might see them performing songs about household appliances.
Deadline reports that the two SNL alums are developing a musical based on the book Everything Is Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age Of Industrial Musicals by Steve Young and Mike Murphy. The source material is a scintillating look at “how corporate America employed Broadway talent to take part in industrial shows from the 1950s to the 1980s to help motivate sales forces and educate employees on products.” In these shows, actors and actresses would perform as inanimate objects or “get overly excited about diesel engines, bathtubs or selling tires while they dreamed of being ‘somebody.’” Okay, sure.
Not all of these musicals were bad, somehow? Deadline notes that some of them were not all there, but some were “high-quality productions,” including the effervescent and gripping The Bathrooms Are Coming, courtesy of American Standard. I don’t know if I’d watch a musical about pedestal sinks, but I bet there’s someone out there that would.
The music for the musical will be written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the men behind the recent TV adaptation of Hairspray(good) and Smash(oh dear). So as predicted, it will either be passably fine or not every good at all!
Seeing as this already sounds like a SNL skit that got cut for time, I’m sure that Ferrell and Wiig will make it work.