Counterfactuals: New, And A Bit Alarming
A friend recently posed to me the hypothetical (and I'm just now realizing probably rhetorical) question, "Where would we be if Howard Ashman were still alive?" And my immediate response was "Well, Wicked probably wouldn't exist, or at least not in the form it does today." Which led me down a rabbit hole of counterfactualizing an elaborate timeline in which Howard Ashman did not die in 1991, and continued to change the landscape of Disney and musical theater in a radical way. (NOTE: This is all for fun and intended to be rather tongue-in-cheek. I do not have the ability to accurately predict this or any other alternate futures. If I did, I would become a time-traveling theatrical producer.) Howard Ashman and frequent collaborator Alan Menken You see, Howard Ashman's role in the shaping of a generation of childhoods began in 1987/88, when he was brought in to write lyrics for Disney's new animated feature, Oliver And Company . While worki...