Broadway Songs Teach A Wall Street Seminar

The crisis on Wall Street has a lot of people singing the blues. But you can also take your cues, both musical and financial, from Broadway.

Back in the 1960s, if you were putting on a Broadway musical, you wanted it to appeal to a guy called the "tired businessman." Before tourists took over the Great White Way, he was the target audience — rich, bored and sitting in an office at showtime right near the theater district.

But he was the tired businessman because he'd just spent all day at work. So rather than put him to sleep with love songs, producers pushed chorus girls doing high kicks: vaudeville-style comedy.

This new style was invigorating enough to keep the shows in the black for more than a year, but it also proved the tired businessman's last hurrah. Within just a few seasons, producers were courting tourists more than New Yorkers, and Broadway had removed from its portfolio — more or less permanently — its little seminar on Wall Street.

These four songs are particularly illustrative of the kind of vaudeville mixed with corporate-speak that the businessman favored.

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