Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins offered a commentary on the (then) nine assassins and would-be assassins who in real life had all aimed, or planned to aim, a firearm at the President of the United States.
In 2018 Louise Bakker directed a production of the show at London’s Pleasance Theatre that disgracefully added an image of President Trump to the musical's shooting alley line-up of the actual historical presidential targets, suggesting in her take on the show, that Trump deserved a bullet.
I called out this appalling incitement to violence in my review of that production and to her credit Bakker then removed Trump’s image from the shooting alley scene in subsequent performances of the show.
While there is no suggestion that Thomas Matthew Crooks who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump on Saturday had seen Bakker’s production, incitement to murder should never be allowed to masquerade as art.
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