Charles Gilbert: Artist's Statement

Curriculum Vita (MS Word) | Directing Resume (PDF) | Bio (PDF) | Artist's Statement

The musical theater has been the center of my professional life for over twenty years. Not only as a composer and lyricist but also as a director, conductor, teacher and producer, I have found it a source of enormous creative and emotional satisfaction. This vibrant art form deftly balances seemingly irreconcilable opposites: art and entertainment, brains and heart, artificiality and authenticity. The best musicals are works of substance crafted to arouse passion, delight and awareness in an audience. These are the works I strive to emulate in my own creative endeavors.

If I cite the individuals in the musical theater who've inspired me - the Sondheims and the Hal Princes and their various predecessors and successors - I'll fear I'll sound more like a fan than a fellow toiler. Instead, let me describe two original projects - one of my first and my most recent - to try to indicate the kind of musical theater I aspire to create:

Shortly after grad school, I began work on a musical entitled "Assassins," originally conceived as a music-theater collage assembled from the words and lives of the individuals who'd tried (with or without success) to kill an American President. I was drawn to this subject by the passionate intensity of the characters and the ways in which their extreme, aberrant behavior could be linked to motives and aspirations which are characteristically American. The piece I wound up writing had both original and historical material in it. The score included substantial amounts of rock and jazz (for energy) as well as pastiches of music from other eras (for irony), and the production incorporated elements of multimedia such as projections, taped narrations and sound collages. It was produced by Theater Express in 1979 and eventually got the attention of Stephen Sondheim, who, with my permission, developed the idea into the musical of the same name which played off-Broadway in 1991. I later directed the Philadelphia professional premiere of Sondheim's "Assassins," and with the success of that production, felt that my original idea had come full circle. When Assassins was produced on Broadway in 2004 and won more Tony Awards than any other musical that season, I felt that the idea had finally been fully vindicated.

One of my recent projects began life nearly a decade ago with a notion for a musical about "a man in love with his computer." (I suspect there are substantial numbers of people like me who spend many intimate hours with their computers.) What kind of man, I wondered, would prefer the company of his computer to real people? I invented the story of Alex Inman, a wheelchair-bound designer of virtual realities who used his computer to invent a world of new possibilities for himself after being crippled in an accident, and worked with playwright Steve Hochman to develop the script for a musical called "Realities." Alex's predicament conjured up issues of intimacy and authenticity in a world increasingly dominated by technology. What is more, the subject matter invited me to explore the ways in which technology - in particular, "techno" music and digital multimedia - could be used to tell the story. So far, the piece has been through several drafts and two readings, and I'm not satisfied that I've found the proper dramatic form for my idea. And so the work continues.

I have a notion of what a modern-day musical ought to be. I've seen enough, heard enough, read enough to be able to imagine a musical of substance, one that provokes the mind and arouses the emotions with a particular density of discourse. My inspirations come from literature and popular music as well as musical theater. In fiction, I admire William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, to name a few; in music, Frank Zappa, John Adams, Kurt Weill, Thelonius Monk; in drama, Bertolt Brecht, Tom Stoppard and David Hare; in musical theater, in addition to the obvious suspects (named above), Marc Blitzstein, William Finn, Michael John LaChiusa and Jonathan Larson. These are writers whose penetrating insights are delivered in surprising packages, writers with a knack for mining the vernacular. I want my work to embody what excites me about these artists and their work: an expansive, bustling, bristling energy.

In my experience, the style of a musical theater work is determined by its subject matter and its intended audience. Certainly, there are characteristics in my past work that can be seen to constitute a personal "style": I frequently work with rhyme, with "pop" song structures, with a rhythmic and harmonic palette that incorporates jazz, pop and rock as well as traditional "theater music." Recently, I have been looking for opportunities to explore the expressive potential of digital music and multimedia technology in the contemporary musical theater. I am intrigued by a musical language that takes advantage of a "produced" sound (using amplification, effects processing, sampling and synthesizers) to create a dynamic contemporary aural landscape mingling live voices and live and digital sound sources.

More importantly, however, I strive to tailor each individual work in a way that will delineate its subject matter and characters effectively and communicate with its intended audience in a compelling manner. I have written works for elementary school audiences, high school audiences, corporate executives, the cabaret crowd, the artistic fringe and the commercial mainstream; each audience presents its own unique set of artistic challenges. I think that the commercial musical theater has repeatedly reinvented itself over the past century as audiences and musical tastes have changed, inventing new styles which draw upon the legacy of the past and incorporate the vibrant immediacy of the present. The present-day musical theater feels chaotic, diverse, "up for grabs" because it is in an evolutionary phase, but I embrace the premise that the musical theater will endure in a variety of forms because audiences have an appetite for the kind of multi-sensory experience a musical can provide: intellectually challenging, emotionally arousing and esthetically ravishing.