"A Demon Gallery of Glory Hounds"
The New York Times
April 23, 2004
By Ben Brantley

THIS is what they always wanted, isn't it? A clear shot at the big time, where people would have to pay attention to them? More than a decade after they first surfaced to critical shudders and head-scratching, the unhappy have-nots of "Assassins" — the glitteringly dark musical by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman about Americans who dream of killing their country's presidents — have finally made it to Broadway.

So can these desperate people, whose greatest fear is being thought small, actually expand in proportion to the lavish production they have been given? Oh boy, can they ever.

Accompanied by a sumptuously full orchestra, and portrayed by a cast that finds the magnetism in rage and resentment, the frightening title characters of "Assassins" are restating their demand to be noticed in the Roundabout Theater Company production, which opened last night at Studio 54. And under Joe Mantello's direction, they are doing so with an eloquence and an intensity that makes a compelling case for a misunderstood show.

Of course, a work that sets to song the thoughts of John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, among others, is still bound to give some theatergoers the creeps. There are reasons this somber funhouse of a show, first staged at the intimate Playwrights Horizons in 1991, has taken so long to arrive on Broadway.

Yet let it be stated that "Assassins" does not celebrate its homicidal subjects. Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Weidman are simply posing a question that arises in many people's minds when they read accounts of shocking, irrational crimes: "Why would someone do that?"

Mr. Sondheim had already proved himself qualified to pursue such a question in "Sweeney Todd," the 1979 musical about a murderous Victorian barber. The show asked audiences to enter, if they dared, a mind polluted by revenge fever. To my knowledge, no one left "Sweeney Todd" with the ambition of becoming a cannibal barber. And I can't imagine that anyone who sees "Assassins" will have the slightest desire to emulate its characters. But leave it to Mr. Sondheim to identify certain emotional poisons — feelings of dispossession and disillusion, of failure and alienation — as chemicals that exist in small quantities in every human body.

Mr. Sondheim magnifies those elements to monstrous proportions, and your being able to recognize them as familiar makes their presence in these looming, distorted forms all the scarier. What's more, "Assassins" has also acquired a new point of connection with contemporary culture.

I'm referring to that imaginary constitutional amendment to which these antiheroes subscribe so ardently: the right to be famous. Americans will happily humiliate themselves and torment others to guarantee a spot on Jerry Springer or "Survivor." And the same glazed, rabidly hungry look that often beams from participants on such shows can be glimpsed in the eyes of the performers here. They range from the epochally famous, like Booth (richly played by Michael Cerveris), to the nearly forgotten, like Charles Guiteau (Denis O'Hare), the megalomaniac who shot President James Garfield.

Though Mr. Weidman's book still veers a bit shakily between blackout-sketch glibness and oratorical punditry, this production has a rich cohesiveness that overrides such discrepancies. And while the assassins' motives range from revolutionary idealism to a dyspeptic stomach, this version emphasizes their shared belief in their potential magnificence as they gather in a funhouse shooting gallery outside of time. As conceived by Mr. Mantello and his brilliant design team, their environment matches their aspirations in ways smaller productions could not.

Robert Brill's basic set, a sprawling tower of wooden scaffolding that evokes the underbelly of the Cyclone rollercoaster at Coney Island, is a bleak, desolate construction that takes on beckoning, lurid life. Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, the lighting designers, have created a painterly tour de force, with glaring walls of color and deep pockets of shadows.

This look of tawdry splendor, of a gimcrack version of eternity, sets the ideal tone for the fractured, time-warping narratives that follow, presided over by a gold-toothed, spiel-chanting carnival Proprietor (the excellent Marc Kudisch). The Proprietor lures the assassins with promises of glory to the discontented. But what follows is also overseen by Booth, who as the man who killed Lincoln is the prototype for the others, and a Balladeer (Neil Patrick Harris).

The Balladeer sings a folky, cheery, deflating counterpoint to the self-aggrandizing accounts of the assassins. Mr. Harris, best known as television's "Doogie Howser," here suggests the older brother from an Eisenhower-era sitcom. Like his appearance, his pleasant voice exudes an anonymous, scrubbed wholesomeness, which winds up working beautifully for the Balladeer's climactic metamorphosis when he morphs into Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mr. Mantello brings remarkable continuity to this seemingly fragmented show. As the various assassins return to the scenes of their crimes, the Proprietor and Booth often materialize by their sides, seeming to massage them into active existence. It is the show's thesis that assassination has become its own disturbing cultural tradition in this country, that each of the characters is made of a cloth first spun by Booth.

Mr. Sondheim's astonishing score takes staples of American folk, pop and ceremonial music and turns them inside out. The sly distortions of familiar musical tropes — whether "Hail to the Chief" or a barbershop quartet — approximate the skewed ways in which these characters hear everyday melodies. Listening, as sweet notes slide into dissonance, you may feel as if your own brain has slipped off the rails.

And how splendidly the orchestra, conducted by Paul Gemignani (with orchestrations by Michael Starobin), realizes this sensibility. The musicians are in loges on either side of the stage, and the sound becomes its own environment, at one with the darkness that enfolds the audience. Some songs assume entirely new dimensions here. In "Unworthy of Your Love," the bizarrely plaintive duet sung by Hinckley (Alexander Gemignani) and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme (Mary Catherine Garrison), what begins as a coffee-house-style ballad expands into the radiant lovelorn brassiness of a Burt Bacharach number.

No cast member disappoints, and it's hard to single one out. But I was especially taken with the brooding, sonorous sobriety of James Barbour as Leon Czolgosz, the Polish factory worker who shot William McKinley, and by Mario Cantone, dizzily strident as the logorrheic Samuel Byck, who planned to crash a plane into Richard Nixon's White House. (The wonderfully wry Becky Ann Baker, as Sara Jane Moore, and Jeffrey Kuhn, as Giuseppe Zangara, round out the complement of assassins.)

But Mr. O'Hare delivers the show's essential tour de force as Guiteau, dancing up the stars to the gallows. As he alternates between snatches of a gospel and a peppy vaudeville number, he reflects the troubled, divided selves of everyone onstage. (Jonathan Butterell did the seamless musical staging.) It also reminds you that no composer writes a nervous breakdown like Mr. Sondheim.

The text doesn't match the intricacy of the songs. Mr. Weidman's rhythmic patterning of repeated phrases is often terrific. But there are moments of hackneyed ponderousness (as when Booth invokes the spirit of Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman") and some gags, like someone impersonating a clumsy Gerald Ford, better suited to "Saturday Night Live."

Still, these are forgivable distractions from what is, all told, a very impressive achievement. For those of you who know only the Playwrights Horizons version, the score now includes "Something Just Broke," which was introduced in the London production at the Donmar Warehouse in 1992. It is performed by members of the ensemble who appear in ghostly tableaus throughout the evening, looking like the prosperous folk of E. L. Doctorow's "Ragtime."

"Something Just Broke" is a chilling acknowledgment that assassins do have an impact, that by pulling a trigger an individual can upset the course of history. The grief-numbed singers are, of course, the people with whom you instinctively identify. But in their light-colored, ethereal costumes by Susan Hilferty, they seem curiously unsubstantial.

They inhabit an orderly dream of a world to which the show's main characters can never gain entry. It's the assassins who are the dominating, vivid presence. For two haunted, exquisitely wrought hours, they are allowed to present their own version of reality. It is by no means a comfortable place. But when your guides are as skilled as the creators of this revival, there is catharsis and even exhilaration in working your way through this tarnished looking-glass land.

ASSASSINS

Book by John Weidman; music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; directed by Joe Mantello; musical direction by Paul Gemignani; musical staging by Jonathan Butterell. Sets by Robert Brill; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; orchestrations by Michael Starobin; production stage manager, William Joseph Barnes. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Ellen Richard, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director, external affairs. At Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Marc Kudisch (Proprietor), James Barbour (Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley), Alexander Gemignani (John Hinckley, who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan), Denis O'Hare (Charles Guiteau, who killed President James Garfield), Jeffrey Kuhn (Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to kill President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt), Mario Cantone (Samuel Byck, who tried to kill President Richard Nixon), Mary Catherine Garrison (Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, who tried to kill President Gerald Ford), Becky Ann Baker (Sara Jane Moore, who tried to kill Mr. Ford), Michael Cerveris (John Wilkes Booth, who killed President Abraham Lincoln) and Neil Patrick Harris (Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald, who killed President John F. Kennedy).

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