"Brilliantly executed 'Assassins' holds emotion at bay"
Pittsburgh Tribune
Saturday, May 15, 2004
By Ed Blank

NEW YORK -- Individually and as a growing collective, the pathological malcontents of "Assassins" (Tony-nominated for best revival of a muscal) step forward and take their shots in the darkest of disturbing musicals.
They're beckoned into a carnival shooting gallery -- "Come here and kill a president" -- by a barker identified as The Proprietor (Marc Kudisch).

"Lots of madmen have had their say if only for a day," they're assured.

"Everybody's got the right to be happy. ... Everybody's got the right to their dreams," The Proprietor exclaims in a rare instance of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim using poor grammatical agreement but arguably in a character-appropriate manner.

It's a bogus American dream The Proprietor is huckstering, perverted into a quest for acknowledgment, celebrity and validation, however rancidly, that has turned present-day TV into a series of reality freak shows.

Wending its way to Broadway's Studio 54 after more than a decade of gestation, "Assassins" began its professional life a few blocks away as a Playwrights Horizons production in 1991 that sold out every performance but left backers wary about the chances of turning a profit on such a troubling musical in a (larger) Broadway house.

"Assassins" went on incubating in regional theaters, including Starlight Productions at Stephen Foster Memorial Theatre in 1997. Roundabout Theatre Company, which stages both open-ended and limited-run Broadway productions, scheduled the musical for the 2001-02 season and backed off because of 9/11.

Here is Roundabout's production at last in the incarnation for which it seemed destined, as directed by Joe Mantello (Tony-nominated for best direction of a musical).

Scenic designer Robert Brill (Tony-nominated for best scenic design), abetted by lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer (Tony-nominated for best lighting design), creates a metaphorical hell, a gallery within the scaffolding of a wooden roller coaster track looming around it. A circular staircase begins about a dozen feet above the stage and twists toward the rafters.

John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris, nominated for best featured actor in a musical) functions as the patriarch of the wackos and wannabes, helping The Proprietor entice them into taking, literally, their shots at immortality.

Anything to cool the festering low self-esteem and make them feel better about themselves -- a life taken and a society disrupted in return for self-approbation that may last the requisite 15 minutes.

As scored by Sondheim and scripted by John Weidman, "Assassins" does not venerate its suspects but renders them as losers obsessed with grandiose notions of being noticed.

"Something Just Broke," a song added after the '91 production, acknowledges that assassins effect change but never the sort they intend. The balm evaporates before the chest can swell.

Sondheim uses a century and a half of musical forms -- folk ballads, barbershop, patriotic marches, jaunty melodies -- to peer into the souls of soulless cretins with recurring character deficiencies. All seem to believe they share an inalienable right to be famous.

Eschewing a traditional narrative, Weidman's book treats its inhabitants as though they existed in a time vacuum that flows forward and backward mercurially.

The assassins appear randomly: anarchic Polish factory worker Leon Czolgosz (James Barbour) to kill President William McKinley; megalomaniac Charles Guiteau (Denis O'Hare, Tony-nominated for best featured actor in a musical) to shoot President James Garfield; would-be plane hijacker Samuel Byck (Mario Cantone) to crash into President Richard Nixon's White House.

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (Mary Catherine Garrison) and Sara Jane Moore (Becky Ann Baker) bungle their lethal escapades. John Hinckley (Alexander Gemignani) dedicates his crime to then-teen movie star Jodie Foster, with whom he fantasizes a romance.

Taunted by Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick Harris) steps to the plate.

The text necessarily seems more repetitious than the score as it brings to a fine point the nihilism of egregiously wrong-headed degenerates.

"Assassins" is never less than an interesting work, if never one that is emotionally compelling; its stylization in concept and presentation holds us at a distance. The execution is dazzling, the orchestrations (Michael Starobin, Tony-nominated for best orchestrations) and vocalizing Sondheimized to perfection.

Studio 54, where the musicians occupy loge boxes above each side of the stage, affords intimacy and ambient scruffiness but a debilitating disadvantage: The seats on ground level are small-round-bottomed cabaret chairs that can be troublesome for those with back ailments. The regular theater seats in the mezzanine and balcony may be preferable.

Ed Blank can be reached at edwblank@aol.com or (412) 854-5555.

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