The Burrus Sales Meeting Shows

For the better part of two decades, Ken Bradbury wrote and directed an annual comedy and variety show for the sales meetings of the Burrus Seed Company, the family hybrid-corn business of central Illinois. These were not polished theatrical evenings so much as affectionate, inside-baseball roasts: musical parodies, game-show send-ups, and sketch comedy built entirely around seed corn, herbicides, dealer incentives, and the rivalries of the agricultural marketplace. The casts were drawn from Burrus staff and regional sales managers, who gamely sang, lip-synced, and performed in drag for the amusement of the dealers gathered each year.

The shows reliably bent national pop culture to cornfield ends. The 2002 edition, "Farm Family Feud," pitted the wholesome Dependable family (a Burrus dealer clan) against rival seed-company families in a game-show format, complete with a host in a loud sports coat and a daughter described as "herbicide tolerant." The 2007 show, "American Idol, the Hybrid Version," fielded a panel of judges named Ryana Secrest, Simon Cowbell, Paula Abdrool, and Donnie Jackson, who scored rival seed companies as they performed parody numbers — DeKalb appearing as Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You Babe" rewritten as a monopolist's love song, and Pioneer turning up as an Elvis act crooning "Return to Sender" about returning a neighbor's seed corn. A running gag had a confused executive ("Tom") wandering onstage believing he was on "Survivor," "Grey's Anatomy," "Dancing With the Stars," and "Hee-Haw" in turn, only to be hauled off by his grandsons.

In later years the format shifted toward filmed sketches featuring the recurring characters Herb and Freida, who promoted Burrus products and dealer incentive trips. But the warmest entry may be the 2014 Readers' Theatre version, which set aside the parody and told the company's own origin story straight: the founding of Burrus seed corn in 1935 by a fifteen-year-old farm boy, Martin Burrus, and his family. Performed as a chorus of voices weaving company memories against the headlines of the day, it followed the Burruses through the Great Depression, the dust and cinch bugs and grasshoppers of the dry thirties, hand-picking and wooden detasseling stilts, the Second World War, and the slow building of a business — a piece of genuine, people-centered history made for the people who had inherited it.

Production Notes

Written and directed by Ken Bradbury for the Burrus Seed Company's annual sales meetings.
The series ran from the late 1990s (scripts survive from 1997–98 onward) through at least 2014, with distinct shows nearly every year, including editions in 2001, 2002 ("Family Feud"), 2003–04, 2005, 2007 ("American Idol, the Hybrid Version"), 2009, and 2012–13 (the Herb and Freida video sketches).
Casts were drawn from Burrus staff and regional sales managers; venues changed yearly as the meeting traveled, and scripts left location names blank to be filled in for each performance.
The 2014 edition was staged as a Readers' Theatre dramatizing the Martin Burrus story and the company's founding in 1935.
Recurring comic devices included musical parodies of well-known songs (rewritten with farming and seed-industry lyrics), game-show and reality-TV formats, and good-natured jabs at competing seed companies.