“I went to three weddings in a very short period of time that spring,” Anselmi says, recalling 2003, when she was scrambling for show ideas to present in the second year of The BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. “I was taken back to what happened at one of the weddings: a friend of mine hooked up with somebody in the bathroom, and the guy on my right side at the table, I wished that he had married the bride.”
“It shoulda been him,” Anselmi thought at the time. With that, the long walk down the aisle toward an original new musical — exploring “all the hijinks that go on in a wedding” — began.
Read more about Barbara Anselmi’s inspiration for It Shoulda Been You (Festival 2009) at TDF Stages.