Amazing Journey

"Sondheim's 'Assassins' Illuminates Nine Dark Hearts"
The Washington Post
Friday, April 23, 2004
By Peter Marks

NEW YORK -- Any doubt as to whether "Assassins" can be mentioned in the same breath as "Sweeney Todd" or "Follies" should now be put to rest. Joe Mantello's spectacular production for the Roundabout Theatre Company reveals it at long last to be one of Stephen Sondheim's most original, disturbing and exquisitely scored shows.

This unsettling dream of a revival, which opened last night at Studio 54, is as dark, daring and disquieting as Broadway gets these days. It not only stamps Mantello as a major Sondheim interpreter, but also trains a blazing follow-spot on a throng of actors -- most notably Michael Cerveris, Neil Patrick Harris, Marc Kudisch, Denis O'Hare, Mario Cantone and Becky Ann Baker -- whose Broadway musical careers will surely pick up additional steam with their contributions to this most stylish and provocative musical of the season.

With the uncomfortable subject it addresses and the improbable cast of murderous misfits to whom it gives mellifluous voice, "Assassins" has not made it to Broadway in a cakewalk. In its debut at Playwrights Horizons in December 1990, off-Broadway audiences preoccupied with hostilities in the Persian Gulf were left puzzled about whether a musical featuring the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley and Squeaky Fromme was in anything close to good taste.

Roundabout, too, was a little squeamish about the high profile of a Broadway production in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001: The musical, after all, includes the story of Samuel Byck (here played by a sensational Cantone), who in 1974 tried to hijack a commercial jet and kill President Richard M. Nixon by crashing it into the White House. Originally scheduled to have its Broadway premiere soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the revival was postponed with the thought that the city was not yet prepared for the splashy return of a singing posse of presidential assailants.

The reality is that with the world such a perpetual powder keg, there may be no time at which "Assassins" will fail to give potential ticket-buyers the creeps. Yet as Mantello's production makes clear -- more profoundly than the original, staged by Jerry Zaks -- "Assassins" does not even come close to ambiguity toward its subject. Over and over, this extraordinary musical, with a book by John Weidman that has been, it seems, egregiously underrated, bathes its characters in contempt. To make the point even more directly, a song has been added since the 1990 version, the affecting "Something Just Broke," in which ordinary Americans vent their grief at the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

But let's not dwell on solemnity. "Assassins" is a demonic grin into the void, a Sondheim specialty, as he proved in "Sweeney Todd." Insanity can be comic -- no, not the plight of the insane, but the delusions themselves. To journey into the psyches of the nine successful and failed presidential assassins is to dive into a captivating pool of derangement. The show is like the twisted sister of "A Chorus Line": the tale of nine demented aspirants to acceptance, vindication, fame, glory, even love.

"Assassins" never asks you to sympathize with its characters. In words and music, it lays bare the compulsions, the half-baked political rationales, the petty grievances, the hallucinations with which each of them nursed an explosive need to lash out. "I did it to bring down the government of Abraham Lincoln and to avenge the ravaged South," declares Booth (a sterling Cerveris). "I did it so my friends would know where I was coming from," exclaims Sara Jane Moore (a hilariously frazzled Baker), who attempted to kill Gerald Ford in 1975. It is the universal "I" that binds these disparate also-rans who shot their way into history. Satisfying their need to express themselves is all that matters to them. In this respect, the show is about the perversion of individuality, about how a society that thrives on a belief in the self pays dearly for the actions of its most selfish citizens.

It's also about the perils of a culture that spins dreams of tabloid immortality, the notion that you can't spell media without "me." As one of his prophetic fellow travelers puts it to Oswald in the chilling, climactic scene, set in that notorious Dallas book depository: "In Florence, Italy, a woman will leap from the Duomo clutching a picture of your victim and cursing your name." This is meant as positive reinforcement.

Told in a series of skits, monologues and songs, "Assassins" now feels less episodic than the original; the progression of the scenes is more fluid, the vignettes more organically linked to one another. Several inspired notions, having to do with casting, staging and design, contribute to this. With gunfire a recurring motif, the setting for the musical is an amusement park's shooting gallery. The designer, Robert Brill, ingeniously puts the action inside the scaffolding of an old wooden roller coaster, a structure that rises majestically to the heavens.

In the recesses of the coaster hang a series of silhouettes of the presidents, life-size figures that resemble the targets at a rifle range. A number is affixed to each poster, relating to the president's place in the order of officeholders. After each crime is reenacted, a poster disappears and the actor playing the killer takes its place. The stirring effect is complete when all the assassins are posed onstage, their faces sickeningly alight. (The brilliant lighting, by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, is a performance unto itself.)

Mantello ensures continuity by creating the illusion of an emotional bond among these loners and crackpots, an idea reinforced in Sondheim's marvelously offbeat production number "Another National Anthem." The songs are all staged with a spartan elegance by Jonathan Butterell; one of the joys of the production is the treatment of guns as song-and-dance props, as nimbly displayed by the shooters as top hats and canes were by Fred Astaire.

As for the actors, each and every one has a stellar moment. It's hard to single out the most enthralling interludes. O'Hare, playing the delusional Charles Guiteau, who shot James Garfield, offers a stunning turn in "The Ballad of Guiteau," smiling ridiculously in his mad romp to the gallows. Kudisch, portraying the shooting gallery's proprietor in shaved head, tattoos and gold teeth, roams the stage menacingly; the moment in which he lends his strength to a shaky Hinckley (the spot-on Alexander Gemignani) for the ill-in-the-head folk-rock number "Unworthy of Your Love" is terrific. And as Byck, an angry ne'er-do-well given to rambling rants into a tape recorder, Cantone harnesses his antic energy, turning what might have been tedious diatribes into scalding comic soliloquies.

It may be upsetting to some theatergoers that the killers get any hearing here at all. But as the evening's guide, a contemporary balladeer played by Harris with a winning boyish detachment, reminds us: "There are those who love regretting / There are those who like extremes / There are those who thrive on chaos and despair."

It behooves the rest of us to listen.

Assassins, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by John Weidman. Directed by Joe Mantello. Set, Robert Brill; costumes, Susan Hilferty; lighting, Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer; sound, Dan Moses Schreier; musical direction, Paul Gemignani; musical staging, Jonathan Butterell; orchestrations, Michael Starobin. With Jeffrey Kuhn, James Barbour, Mary Catherine Garrison, Sally Wilfert. Approximately two hours. Through June 20 at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., New York. Call 212-719-1300 or visit www.roundabouttheatre.org.

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