'Assassins' works
The Journal News
April 23, 2004
By Jacques le Sourd

Perhaps the darkness of the world has finally caught up with the darkness of Stephen Sondheim's mind. How else to explain why "Assassins," the Sondheim musical that seemed so perverse in 1991, should seem so sensible now?

A glittering and often heart-stopping revival opened last night at the Roundabout Theatre Co.'s Studio 54.

This musical remains as black-hearted as Broadway shows come: It presents a rogues' gallery of presidential assassins and would-be assassins singing lilting American ballads that seem to contradict their blood-spattered place in our history.

This is a Sondheim show with tunes you come out humming, in spite of yourself.

It posits the American dream as nightmare. Here, people who are terminal failures find their big chance at immortality in the great American contest for celebrity, by shooting somebody dead.

But the show has the cool breath of sinister reality.

One of the wannabes, for example, is Samuel Byck (Mario Cantone), a man who tried to hijack a commercial airliner and fly it into Richard Nixon's White House in 1974. He was a minor figure in the 1991 version, which was directed by Jerry Zaks. Now his mind-boggling monologue of runaway paranoia, superbly delivered by Cantone in a Santa Claus suit, has the added creepiness of foreshadowing the events of 9/11.

The show, which has a remarkable (and often very funny) book by John Weidman, has been directed with an exquisite eye for detail by Joe Mantello ("Wicked," "Take Me Out").

The cast comprises an overwhelming array of major Broadway talents, including Neil Patrick Harris (TV's "Doogie Howser, M.D."), Denis O'Hare (a Tony-winner for "Take Me Out"), Marc Kudisch, Michael Cerveris and Becky Ann Baker. (The original cast was pretty wonderful, too: Victor Garber, Debra Monk, Terence Mann, Jonathan Hadary, Lee Wilkof and Patrick Cassidy, in the tiny Playwrights Horizons. The show has never been on Broadway before.)

But what is significant in this revival is the very visible presence of musical director Paul Gemignani, a Broadway legend who was the show's original musical director. He sits to the front of one of the two large boxes in what was, after all, a theater (before it became a discotheque). His very presence gives a gravitas to the event, and the orchestra he leads is divided between the two boxes.

The show never jelled in its first incarnation, and left a distinctly sour taste with critics and audiences. That was during the first Persian Gulf War. The revival was originally scheduled at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and was wisely canceled. But Roundabout persisted (foolishly, it seemed) in its wish to bring it back.

Kudisch, heavily muscled and tattooed, and with his head shaved, plays the owner of a shooting gallery in an amusement park from hell. "Shoot! Win," says a huge lighted sign in Robert Brill's set design, sepulchrally lighted by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer. "Hit the prez! Win a prize!" A staircase winds its way up into the flies, suggesting a roller coaster. It will, instead, be the stairs to the gallows climbed by Charles Guiteau (O'Hare), the madman who shot President Garfield.

O'Hare paints an oddly touching portrait of lunacy. And he sings a chilling lullaby, "I Am Going to the Lordy," as he climbs those stairs.

Cerveris glistens with evil as the chief assassin, and also the first, the killer of Abraham Lincoln. An actor stung by "bad reviews" and obsessed with Confederate sympathies ("the bruises may never be healed"), he functions as a kind of master of ceremonies for all the assassins to follow. He unifies their crimes.

He is an elegant killer who sings his own ballad and eventually explains: "Murder is a tawdry little crime; it's born of greed, or lust, or liquor ... But when a president gets killed, he [is] assassinated."

James Barbour is an affecting Leon Czolgosz, a child of Polish immigrants born to a life of brute factory work. He connects, however briefly, with anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman (Anne L. Nathan), who indirectly inspires him to shoot President McKinley.

His "Gun Song" is among the most Sondheimesque of the numbers, and it underscores one of the show's messages, against the loose American ownership of guns. "It takes a lot of men to make a gun," is the tune's somber opening lyric.

The comic high point of "Assassins," which may well take you by surprise, is a scene for two bumblers who tried to kill President Gerald R. Ford on two occasions two weeks apart.

Baker is hilarious as Sara Jane Moore, a woman who was fired by the FBI on her way to her date with destiny, who accidentally shoots her dog in attempting to cope with her gun. A moment involving Sara Jane and her bratty son (Eamon Foley) is utterly priceless. After being helped by the president, she literally throws her bullets at him because she can't fire the gun.

Mary Catherine Garrison is Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a failed "flower child" and a Charles Manson disciple, with dreams of the Armageddon she might help Manson bring about if she could only kill Ford.

The musical builds to the appearance of Lee Harvey Oswald (Harris), who has been onstage all along as an almost cheerful "balladeer." This is potentially the most difficult scene to pull off, because much of the audience remembers the indelible trauma of the Kennedy assassination.

A tune written in 1992 for a British version of "Assassins" helps things, allowing a frank expression of the grief that is otherwise a rare commodity in this show. The number is "Something Just Broke." Except for the odd fact that the devastated citizens are wearing the same 1930s costumes they wore for an earlier scene (surely a budgetary matter), the song helps by providing a pause from the manic, comic and sadistic approach that has reigned so far.

Before the number, though, the assassins led by Booth gather round Oswald to persuade him to commit his unspeakable crime, to guarantee his immortality and add luster to their own. It's a tricky idea, but this time it works.

"All your life you've wanted to be part of something, Lee," Booth tells him. "You're finally going to get your wish. ... I've seen the future, Lee. And you are it."

Oswald walks to the window of the Dallas School Book Depository. He shoots. He turns, and in a moment of stagecraft that takes your breath away, the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination is projected onto his white T-shirt.

With that, the "Assassins" team, with Mantello deserving the most credit, has solved the gravest problem of this show, which was that it seemed to be flip and irreverent about a hideously painful subject.

Let's face it: "Assassins" is still the product of a pretty twisted imagination, which has given us "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," "Passion," about a tortured unrequited love, and "Pacific Overtures," about the rape of Asia.

But now this explosive material is pulled off with true style, and with the thematic weight the subject requires.

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