"Dark Side Of Nation's Psyche "
Sondheim-Weidman's `Assassins' A Discordant Tour Of American History
The Hartford Courant
April 23, 2004
By Malcolm Johnson

NEW YORK - The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Chicago," with its singing-dancing lady-killers, inspired the Oscar-winning film version after years of false starts. The first Broadway production of another musical about gunplay in America probably will never become a long-running hit or a movie, even with some to-die-for songs by Stephen Sondheim. Its title, "Assassins," hints at the reason.

The ripping new production by Joe Mantello, which opened Thursday night at Studio 54, fulfills a long effort to put the 1991 show by Sondheim and John Weidman in the spotlight. Despite a superb cast, the original Playwrights Horizons production failed to attract investors. A more recent plan to take "Assassins" to Broadway was scrapped after 9/11. A musical about presidential assassinations seemed not quite timely.

For many people, the moment for "Assassins" may never come. Others will not want to miss this bold and thoughtful, though flawed exploration of the dark side of the national psyche, and its cult of celebrity. Sondheim and Weidman have framed their assemblage of men and women with fatal designs on the lives of America's commanders-in-chief within a carnival setting, a shooting gallery similar to the one envisioned by Suzan-Lori Parks in "Topdog/Underdog," now at Hartford Stage. Robert Brill has designed a rough wooden structure with an upper gallery and winding stairs, suggesting an old roller coaster. Lights flash on carny signs inviting fairgoers to "Hit the Prez/Win a Prize." Presiding over the grim fun is a kind of Barker, the almost Mephistophelean Proprietor of muscular, sinister, big-voiced Marc Kudisch. The killers, some eternally infamous, more all but forgotten, join the ringmaster in the bright, upbeat "Everybody's Got the Right." In this case, Happiness is a Warm Gun.

The intermissionless "Assassins" unfolds before audiences seated cabaret-style as a kind of vaudeville, with the killers as the "acts." The scenes, some crazily humorous, some darkly satirical, are crammed with facts, for this is a "lehrstuck," or "teaching play," in the manner of Bertolt Brecht. Occasionally, despite the crackling energy and tactile black humor of Mantello's production, the history lessons bog down. Still, it is illuminating to witness the meeting between William McKinley's killer, Leon Czolgosz, and the star anarchist Emma Goldman, or to hear the ravings of the James Garfield's killer, the dapper, fey, insane Charles Guiteau. The actors cast in these roles, James Barbour, as the hulking, enraged Czolgosz, and Denis O'Hare, as the stylish, insouciant Guiteau, illuminate the range of illusions that pushed presidential assassins into acts they regarded as somehow necessary and even heroic.

"Sic semper tyrranus," or "Thus Always With Tyrants," cried the prototype of the American assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, after shooting Abraham Lincoln. As acted by Michael Cerveris, the former "Tommy" now transformed into a goateed matinee idol in elegant costumes by Jess Goldstein, Booth belongs at the pinnacle of the pantheon in this Satanic vaudeville. After his crime is enacted and he joins in "The Ballad of Booth" with Neil Patrick Harris' affable, folky, boy-next-door Balladeer, Cerveris' Booth takes his place in the niche once papered by the presidential target 16 (Lincoln was the 16th president), and glowers like some underworld demon from his chair in hell. Yet, of course, the father of all assassins must emerge, to urge on his followers.

After Booth, the only other 19th century assassin was Guiteau, who cakewalks to his own hymn to "Lordy." Here Mantello makes dramatic use of that spiral staircase, as O'Hare jauntily ascends, followed by the shock effect of a hanging. But the Sondheim-Weidman reverie on the nature of humans who must aggrandize themselves by shooting at powerful men does not follow a chronological line. Giuseppe Zangaga, a pathetic little bricklayer from Calabria touchingly played by Jeffrey Kuhn, belongs to a less privileged class of shooter than Guiteau and Booth. Like McKinley's killer, the man who tried to gun down Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 was an immigrant who had become an industrial slave in his childhood.

The would-be assassins, and those who succeed, have little in common other than a demented hatred for their gods. Samuel Byck, ravingly played by Mario Cantone in a bizarrely comic caricature, sought to ally himself with Leonard Bernstein and Jonas Salk before attempting to hijack a jetliner with which to incinerate the Nixon White House. Then there are the Manson girls, Mary Catherine Garrison's worshipful sex kitten, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, and Becky Ann Baker's hilarious but deeply sad Sara Jane Moore. In a Keystone Killers bit, these two fail to hit Gerald Ford in concert, rather than separately.

Garrison and Alexander Gemignani's slope-shouldered, gawky John Hinckley Jr. join in a sweet Sondheim pastiche, the moony ballad "Unworthy of Your Love." Much of the music has a jingoistic ring, with echoes of Sousa and "Hail to the Chief." But the Balladeer might be a '60s troubadour, until it turns out that Harris' Steve McQueen look-alike is none other than the ultimate misfit, Lee Harvey Oswald, goaded by Booth on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository as "Assassins" reaches its climax, with another rendition of "Everybody's Got the Right" and the recurrent phrase: "All you have to do is squeeze your little finger."

Who but Sondheim would write such stuff? While "Assassins" works better as a provocative play with songs than as a fully realized musical, its eclectic score gives it theatricality and the complex structure of a symphonic piece by Ives. With its mix of duets and choral outpourings from the principals and a small spiffy ensemble, this is America singing, however discordantly.

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