"Blasts from our past"
New York Daily News
April 23, 2004
By Howard Kissel

Imagine a bouquet composed of deadly nightshade, Venus's-flytrap and other noxious blooms.

The beauty of these flowers would be offset by your awareness that they are lethal.

This gives you a rough idea of "Assassins," whose florist is Stephen Sondheim. With librettist John Weidman, he has fashioned a musical fantasia about presidential assassins.

The show is set in a gaudy carnival shooting gallery whose proprietor invites us to "c'mere and shoot a President."

In the musical collage that follows, we see, among other things, John Wilkes Booth persuading Lee Harvey Oswald to aim his rifle at the presidential motorcade, rather than himself.

Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, the two would-be assassins of Gerald Ford, have a dizzy conversation. And Charles Guiteau, James Garfield's assassin, sings a happy hymn on his way to his hanging.

Such grotesque goings-on are depicted in a series of musical styles, ranging from parodies of '50s pop and an old-fashioned hymn to a few complex numbers that are pure Sondheim. The overall premise is that assassins represent the dark side of the American psyche, which can find fulfillment only in attacking conventional values.

Attributing political intentions to psychopaths may give them more credit for more intellectual acumen than they deserve, but the result is a show both repellent and riveting, an esthetic objective Sondheim has pursued since his 1979 masterpiece "Sweeney Todd."

The Roundabout's stunning revival, directed by Joe Mantello, is far more elaborate than the 1991 original workshop production at the then-tiny Playwrights Horizons Theater. Robert Brill's set, which fills the huge Studio 54 stage, conveys both a bare-bones carnival and, at one point, the scaffold for the hanging. The lighting makes the set a macabre, tawdry character in the grisly proceedings.

The cast is spectacular, starting with the commanding Marc Kudisch as the proprietor and the eerily suave Michael Cerveris as Booth. James Barbour, who plays William McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, turns a disquieting song about guns into a powerful aria.

Mario Cantone is savagely funny as the unhinged Samuel Byck, who tried to kill Nixon. Neil Patrick Harris makes a beautifully unsettling transition from a bland balladeer to Oswald.

Mary Catherine Garrison and Becky Ann Baker are wonderfully daffy as Ford's assailants, while Alexander Gemigniani has an off-kilter charm as John Hinckley. Denis O'Hare is a little too cute as the ditsy Guiteau.

Under Paul Gemigniani's musical direction, the score, especially "Something Just Broke," a number added for the 1992 London production, comes across with extraordinary power.

"Assassins" is Sondheim's wildest show. It is no less distasteful than it was a decade ago. But events have given us the psychic shock absorbers that help us - dare I say - enjoy it.

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