After helming New York productions of Sweeney Todd, Company, Road Show, Passion, and Pacific Overtures, director John Doyle continues to diligently work his way through the Sondheim oeuvre—finally, after a year-and-a-half-long pandemic-related delay, putting up the composer’s most divisive musical, Assassins, at Classic Stage Company.
He could hardly ask for a better group of actors to play this gallery of presidential shooters: the square-jawed Steven Pasquale as the 19th-century “pioneer” John Wilkes Booth; Will Swenson, wonderfully wild-eyed as the mentally unstable Charles Guiteau; Brandon Uranowitz as soft-spoken anarchist Leon Czolgosz (his declaration of love to Emma Goldman, played by Bianca Horn, is superb); and Ethan Slater as that other infamous three-named killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. (Slater also does impressive double duty as the show’s ubiquitous guitar-strumming Balladeer/narrator/conscience.)
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
And let’s not forget the would-be assassins: Wesley Taylor, appropriately unnerving as Giuseppe Zangara, the Italian immigrant whose six shots missed FDR but killed Chicago mayor Anton Cermak; a scene-stealing Andy Grotelueschen (a Tony nominee for his scene stealing in Tootsie) as the Bernstein-obsessed Santa Claus who planned to run a plane into the Nixon White House; Tavi Gevinson and Judy Kuhn, providing pitch-perfect comic relief—John Weidman’s book really is razor-sharp—as Manson acolyte Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and accountant/FBI informant Sara Jane Moore, respectively, who both tried to take down Gerald Ford; and a quietly skeevy Adam Chanler-Berat as the Jodie Foster stalker who shot Reagan. For all you Gossip Girl fans out there: Gevinson and Chanler-Berat—aka Constance Billard’s nosiest teachers in the HBO Max sexed-up soap—get to duet on what’s surely Sondheim’s ickiest (but prettiest!) love song, “Unworthy of Your Love.” As Squeaky sings: “I am nothing,/ You are wind and devil and god,/ Charlie,/ Take my blood and my body/ For your love.” So…sweet.
What makes Assassins work is the juxtaposition of its dark material against a musical comedy backdrop. (Some people argue that it doesn’t work, that it glorifies men’s misdeeds and romanticizes their rage, but that’s an argument for another time.) A shooting gallery is de rigueur for the show, as the Proprietor/carny (Eddie Cooper) calls up character after character and asks “You wanna shoot a president?,” passing out guns like cotton candy. Some productions—such as the 2004 Tony-winning Broadway revival—lean more heavily into the creepy carnival theme. But other than flickering lights and a spinning target bearing assorted presidential faces, this Assassins mostly eschews that framework. For instance: Here, the guns are presented not as prizes but as metaphors, atop a folded American flag.
The heavy-handedness continues from scene to scene: There’s precious little of the vaudevillian sketch-style ambience you might remember from previous productions. Hard to do when actors are stopping to put on American flag masks every few minutes. Yes, everything is red, white, and blue: the lights, the chairs, the stage floor, a good chunk of the costumes; the instrument-playing characters even wear red, white, and blue coveralls, so they look like Fourth of July–ready Times Square sanitation workers. (Of course there are roving musicians onstage, because if an actor isn’t playing an instrument in a Doyle revival, did it really happen?)
And just in case you didn’t get Sondheim and Weidman’s point—their subtle comment on the beautiful fragility of our democracy (the penultimate number, following Kennedy’s assassination, is “Something Just Broke”)—Doyle really hammers it home by bringing up a photo of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Well, as they sing in the finale, “free country!”
Assassins opened Nov. 14, 2021, at the Classic Stage Company and runs through Jan. 29, 2022. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
