'Assassins': A Broadway show whose time has come
USA TODAY
April 23, 2004
By Elysa Gardner

NEW YORK — At long last, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Assassins bowed off-Broadway in 1991, right after the first Gulf War erupted — not an opportune time to unveil a musical focusing on murderers and would-be murderers of U.S. presidents. A decade later, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's star-crossed baby was finally ready for Broadway. Then came Sept. 11 ... and the war in Afghanistan and troubles in Iraq. That's to say nothing of the crackdown on controversial creative expression following a certain pop star's wardrobe malfunction.

Yet at press time, the Roundabout Theatre Company's Assassins (* * * out of four) was set to open Thursday, in all its squalid splendor, at Studio 54.

Mind you, even the most ardent jingoist would be hard-pressed to argue that Sondheim's songs or Weidman's libretto seek to glorify, or justify, the actions of Assassins' characters. Each member of this rogues' gallery is patently unsavory and at least a few bricks short of a full load.

The show addresses the social factors that can help push such unstable, disenfranchised types over the edge, but never in a way that asks us to blame the victims — who, we're reminded, don't just include targeted national leaders. In the moving "Something Just Broke", we experience John F. Kennedy's brutal death through the eyes of everyday people.

The energy, though, is more often manic than mournful. Set designer Robert Brill presents a gaudy, gory carnival where the freaks are customers rather than attractions. "Everybody's got the right to their dreams," sings a proprietor, setting an ironic tone. But there also is intense sorrow and longing in Sondheim's lyrics. His melodies, too, soar with an unsentimental warmth, reminding us that anyone who contends you can't hum this guy's tunes is either musically challenged or just plain lazy.

Weidman's book, sadly, is less impressive. There are clever and insightful touches, but more poignant moments are marred by a talky earnestness that seems at odds with Sondheim's sophistication and bite.

Director Joe Mantello and his gifted ensemble do manage to mine every morsel of wit and pain. Alexander Gemignani and James Barbour play John Hinckley Jr. and Leon Czolgosz (William McKinley's assassin) with a delicate and utterly convincing pathos. Neil Patrick Harris is similarly affecting as Lee Harvey Oswald, who in a fantastic scene is prodded by John Wilkes Booth. "You want what everybody wants ... to be in other people's thoughts," Lincoln's killer tells Kennedy's killer.

At a time when reality TV and media sensationalism are blurring the line between fame and notoriety, it's one of several observations that makes Assassins more topical today than its creators might have predicted — or hoped — it would be.

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