They shoot presidents, don't they?
Newsday
April 23, 2004
By Linda Winer

When Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins" was not well received Off-Broadway in 1991, some blamed its failure on bad timing. After all, went the argument, who can enjoy a musical revue about people killing American presidents while the country's fighting the Gulf War?

One millennium, a national catastrophe and another Gulf war later, anyone who would have been offended by the subject may well be ballistic now. For those of us who had merely found "Assassins" to be fuzzy- headed and pseudo-serious, however, the Roundabout Theatre Company's long-delayed Broadway revival more than justifies another look.

As social commentary, the show still doesn't add up to much. John Weidman's book still does not build to the revelations that Sondheim's shrewd Americana pastiche keeps promising. But there is a difference - besides 13 intervening years - in the show that opened last night in the former home of "Cabaret" at Studio 54. Where the original was a chamber musical in the tiny Playwrights Horizons with just three musicians and an uncertain tone, this full production is dynamite.

Joe Mantello, already represented on Broadway this season with the massively overproduced "Wicked," is blissfully in charge of all the show's prickly macabre and playful contradictions. Sondheim specialist Paul Gemignani conducts a split orchestra that hovers above both sides of the vaulting contraption of a stage, designed by Robert Brill to suggest the vast underbelly of an old-time wooden roller coaster. Lest we underestimate the sick-joke sensibility that lurks in the cracks between the 18 dreamlike historical scenes, the sensitive among us should know that a Jodie Foster rag doll is one of the prizes hanging high above the fairground shooting gallery.

We are, after all, sitting at nightclub tables watching a carny barker (Marc Kudisch) hawk - to a jaunty two-step with calliope backdrop - "Hey, pal, feelin' blue? Don't know what to do? ... C'mere and kill a president." There is a circle of stalls, each containing a cutout of a dark figure with a bull's-eye target on him. The signs, spelled out in party lights, promise, "Hit the President! Win a Prize!"

For the next two hours, without intermission, we are among the bystanders of a bizarre but limited musical version of our bizarre but inescapable history. The familiar and unfamiliar tales begin with John Wilkes Booth - treated here as a pioneer - in 1865 and include Lee Harvey Oswald, goaded into action in 1963 by Booth and seven others who killed or tried to kill presidents. As they urge Oswald to "connect to us" in "Another National Anthem" - "for those who never win" - the effect is almost laughable, like a support group for lone gunmen.

Weidman never touches the tough daring of the subject. And the lineup of individual pathologies seems almost innocent in a time when assassinations are more often ordered by political agenda. Where Weidman and, at times, even Sondheim lose their nerve, Mantello finds the images to enhance the intentional, awful inappropriateness of the subject. He may even step over a line by projecting the Zapruder film onto Oswald's T-shirt. We can argue about taste - and New Yorkers certainly will - but nobody can accuse the production of wimping out.

The terrific cast is in synch with Mantello's concept and the irony of a show that has killers sing, over and over, the American mantra, "Everybody's got the right to their dreams." Kudisch, proprietor of the target game, has the deep, sleazy appeal to match the glint of his silver tooth. Michael Cerveris gives Booth the preening zealousness of an actor who believes Lincoln put "blood on the clover" but just might be upset about bad reviews.

Denis O'Hare has a crazed, almost lovable quality as Charles Guiteau, the delusional evangelist who shot James Garfield because he wouldn't make him ambassador to France. O'Hare somehow performs Guiteau's gallows song while climbing up and down the steep staircase backwards.

Alexander Gemignani, lovely as a hapless John Hinckley, and Mary Catherine Garrison, waiflike as Squeaky Fromme, sing a demented, sweet pop ballad, "Unworthy of Your Love," to Jodie and Charles Manson. Mario Cantone, as Samuel Byck, is aptly out of control delivering what is the most shattering threat today: He vows to crash a 747 into the White House and "incinerate Dick Nixon."

Best of all, there is Neil Patrick Harris as both Oswald and as the easygoing balladeer who connects whatever tissue can be connected in cheerful country ballads and a straightforward likability. The creepiest, most stirring songs include a loving tribute, a lilting waltz, to guns: "All you have to do is/move your little finger. ..." Toward the end, there is a new song from the London production, "Something Just Broke," meant to wrench us back from the subversive entertainment and remind us of the repercussions. It is too little, too late - like slapping a frown button on a smile.

ASSASSINS. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman. Directed by Joe Mantello. Roundabout Theatre Company, Studio 54, east of Eighth Avenue. Seen at Saturday evening's preview.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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