One additional point: the Dramatists Guild and the Musical Theater Lab created a program for new musicals and welcomed submissions in 1979/1980. I was running the Musical Theater Lab at the time and Sondheim was on the board. He looked over the titles of all the submissions and said, "Assassins looks interesting. Could you send a copy over to me?" The DG/MTL project never not off the ground, but that is where Charles first submitted his Assassins.
Assassins is my favorite show 🥲 and had no idea that the idea originally came from someone else!! I'm grateful things unfolded the way they did, and I'm grateful for Charles Gilbert for coming up with this incredible show 🥲🙏
I appreciate Gilbert’s concern about the foregrounding of the assassins’ seeming humanity nearly to the point of empathy—and I am really grateful that his concern led to the creation of “Something Just Broke”—but for me, the temptation of empathy was already shattered by the end of “The Ballad of Booth”. You’re kind of going with old JWB there in his riveting elegy for the South (tho feeling guilty about it)—and then he brings it up short with a violent spitting out of the n-word. Almost hadja there, didn’t he?
One additional point: the Dramatists Guild and the Musical Theater Lab created a program for new musicals and welcomed submissions in 1979/1980. I was running the Musical Theater Lab at the time and Sondheim was on the board. He looked over the titles of all the submissions and said, "Assassins looks interesting. Could you send a copy over to me?" The DG/MTL project never not off the ground, but that is where Charles first submitted his Assassins.
Ted, that’s a remarkable detail that I never knew. It pleases me so much to know you had a hand in making that connection!
Assassins is my favorite show 🥲 and had no idea that the idea originally came from someone else!! I'm grateful things unfolded the way they did, and I'm grateful for Charles Gilbert for coming up with this incredible show 🥲🙏
I appreciate Gilbert’s concern about the foregrounding of the assassins’ seeming humanity nearly to the point of empathy—and I am really grateful that his concern led to the creation of “Something Just Broke”—but for me, the temptation of empathy was already shattered by the end of “The Ballad of Booth”. You’re kind of going with old JWB there in his riveting elegy for the South (tho feeling guilty about it)—and then he brings it up short with a violent spitting out of the n-word. Almost hadja there, didn’t he?