"Assassins"
nytheatre.com
April 28, 2004
by Martin Denton

"Everybody's got the right to be happy," sings the Proprietor at the start of Assassins; a man whose singularly American business is to sells guns to people who want to shoot a president. There's irony here, of course; and the slight distortion of Jefferson's phrase is interesting (recall that he talked about an "inalienable right" to "the pursuit of happiness"—emphasis mine). Later, after the stories of nine successful or would-be assassins have been played out and reviewed, the same character sings:

And it didn't mean a nickel,
You just shed a little blood,
And a lot of people shed a lot of tears.
Yes, you made a little moment
And you stirred a little mud—

But it didn't fix the stomach
And you've drunk your final Bud,
And it didn't help the workers
And it didn't heal the country
And it didn't make them listen
And they never said, "We're sorry"—

Incisive, economic writing like this is why Stephen Sondheim is revered as our foremost theatre composer-lyricist. But wait a minute; let's parse these words. "Heal the country"—that refers to John Wilkes Booth, I guess; "Help the workers" alludes to Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who killed President McKinley. "Fix the stomach"?—that's about Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant who missed when he fired at Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the program tells us that he blamed his chronic stomach pains "on the capitalist system that forced his father to put him to work at age six."

Are Booth and Czolgosz the same as Zangara? As Lee Harvey Oswald, whose motives for shooting John F. Kennedy (if, indeed, he really did shoot him) are still unknown? As John Hinckley, the mentally ill young man who tried to kill Ronald Reagan to impress a movie star?

Assassins gives all of these more-or-less notorious folks a little moment in the sun, so to speak; and then—most un-Americanly, I'd say—concludes that they're all alike: losers and buffoons who shot to kill only for the attention. Sondheim reductively speculates that Booth killed Lincoln because he thought he'd "get applause"; book-writer John Weidman, much more puzzlingly and disturbingly, gives us a Dallas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963 where Lee Harvey Oswald is egged on to his deed by the ghosts and specters of past and future assassins, who tell him "Without you, we're just footnotes in a history book."

I had hoped for some clearer thinking in this show, and some more arresting insights. I was aware of the breaking of a taboo—this would seem to be a fairly inappropriate topic for musicalization, after all; Weidman certainly crosses the boundaries of good taste when, for example, he has Gerald Ford trip, Chevy Chase-like, over a bunch of bullets that have just been dropped by Sara Jane Moore. But I don't think that shock value is the main idea of Assassins; but at the end of the show, I was entirely unsure what the authors wanted me to understand (except, possibly, that 20th century assassins are shallower than 19th century assassins).

Nor, unhappily, was I particularly entertained. There are a few striking musical numbers in Assassins, but its book is relentlessly facile, going for easy laughs at the expense of its admittedly unadmirable characters in scene after repetitive scene. The production strikes me as unimpressive, squandering the talents of some performers (Marc Kudisch, Anne L. Nathan, Jeffrey Kuhn—all terrific, but with practically nothing to do), while indulging the shameless (if crowd-pleasing) scenery-chewing of others (worst offenders: Denis O'Hare and Michael Cerveris). Neil Patrick Harris, inexplicably doubling as Oswald and the show's narrator (the "Balladeer"), sings pleasantly but without any apparent feel for what he's saying. Only James Barbour, as Czolgosz, creates a credible character. The set—a tall, seriously underused mass of stairs and scaffolding that covers almost all of the Studio 54 stage—forces the action onto a small playing area; director Joe Mantello copes, as he did in Wicked, with minimal, unimaginative blocking.

It all makes for a long and—here's the really disappointing part--unengaging two hours. At his best, which is to say a lot of the time, Sondheim reveals truth with startling clarity; that's what any great artist does. But there are no a-ha! moments in Assassins; just a lot of ho-hum ones.

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