The shots land a little differently this time.
Assassins, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s darkly comic pageant of all-American mania and madness, is back, now at the Classic Stage Company in the hands of the great Sondheim minimalist John Doyle. With a fresh urgency, an extraordinary cast, and a characteristically unshowy staging, it is a thrilling return.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
But it isn’t Doyle who has transformed Assassins. While the British director made his name in New York with, first, his drastically stripped-down Sweeney Todd (with Patti LuPone as a tuba-toting Mrs. Lovett) and, next, his slim, chamber Company, Assassins, set in a sort of spectral fairground, has always called for a fairly Doylized treatment. I didn’t see the original production, at Playwrights Horizons in 1990, but both its Broadway premiere, at Studio 54 in 2004, and its most recent staging, at Encores! Off-Center in 2017, featured simple, suggestive sets, different in scale but not so much in kind from what Doyle (who designs as well as directs) does at CSC.
No, what has changed Assassins is the world around it.
The musical concerns itself with nine men and women who have tried to kill presidents of the United States, only four of them successfully. It is a prickly, brooding, surprisingly funny piece, examining the underside of American ambition.
(You can see, here and there, connections to Road Show, also known as Bounce, a later, less successful Sondheim-Weidman effort, about the ambitious, sometimes dishonest Mizner brothers, who among many other adventures helped to create modern South Florida. Consider lyrics from “Another National Anthem,” as Assassins builds to its climax at the Texas School Book Depository: “I just heard/ On the news/ Where the mailman won the lottery/ Goes to show/ When you lose/ what you do is try again.” It might as well be the Mizners’ motto. (Road Show’s off-Broadway debut, at the Public Theater a dozen years ago, was directed by Doyle.)
In past years, Assassins has always felt mostly an indictment of America’s addiction to celebrity. “Everybody’s got the right to be happy,” the company sings at both the start and end of the show. “Everybody’s got the right to their dreams.” One by one, starting with John Wilkes Booth and ending with Lee Harvey Oswald, we learn about people who achieved worldwide fame through what you might call non-traditional means. Throughout, they’re egged on by Booth—an accomplished actor, remember, who the musical suggests never got the acclaim he felt he deserved. Baby, we remember their names.
But in our splintered political moment—when 11 months ago a mob stormed the Capitol, when a murderous vigilante in Wisconsin seems on his way to acquittal, when millions of Americans believe the insane QAnon conspiracy theory—Assassins feels not so much about an American compulsion for recognition but instead about a less impeachable offense: the desire to belong.
As portrayed in Weidman’s book and Sondheim’s songs, these assassins and would-be assassins are, simply, lonely. They feel wronged. They feel left out. They fear the world has passed them by. Oswald defected to Russia to try to fit in, then he defected back. Squeaky Fromme, who tried to kill Gerald Ford, was an outcast who joined the Manson family. Sara Jane Moore, who did the same just weeks later, was married and divorced five times. John Hinckley wanted Jodie Foster to love him. Sam Byck, who tried to kill Nixon, was divorced and unemployed, and sending rambling audiotapes to celebrities.
The performances are uniformly excellent. As written, each character isn’t menacing so much as lost. With the exceptions of Booth and Oswald, they’re off, odd, and fairly amusing. Some parts are showier than others. Steven Pasquale is a commanding, ominous Booth. Tavi Gevinson and Sara Jane Moore have a lot of fun as Fromme and Moore, two different versions of lost 1970s searchers. Adam Chanler-Berat renders Hinckley as sweetly heartstruck. Andy Grotelueschen gives Byck an amusing, desperately blustery pathos.
Doyle has dressed the thrust stage at CSC with low-key Americana, there’s wood paneling and a spindled bannister in front of the overhead musicians that suggests a saloon. The stage is a huge flag; the ensemble players are in red, white, and blue jumpsuits. The presidential seal is projected on the upstage wall; the projection shifts to various presidents and, inevitably, the Zapruder film. Some of Doyle’s gestures can be a bit self-serious (all those flags), not least the projected January 6 news photo in the show’s final moments, lest anyone in attendance has entirely lost their sense of subtlety. (The costumes are by Ann Hould-Ward and the projections by Steve Channon.) Greg Jarrett created new, bluegrass-y orchestrations that match the jamboree feel. There are only three credited musicians, but the ensemble (and two leads) also play instruments, in the Doyle style. They all sound good.
What’s most remarkable, however, is just how contemporary this three-decade old musical can feel. In one of Sam Byck’s monologues, he is speaking on tape to Nixon: “You seen a paper lately?! ‘Grandma Lives in Packing Crate!’ ‘Sewage Closes Jersey Beaches!’ ‘Saudi Prince Buys Howard Johnson’s!’ What the hell is going on here, Dick?! It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” The real Byck was a McGovernite; this Byck would be a Trump voter.
And at the Assassins climax, all the other killers and would-be killers convince Oswald to take the rifle. “All your life you’ve wanted to be part of something, Lee,” says Booth, the ringleader. “You’re finally going to get your wish.” There are a lot of very unhappy people today, desperate to be a part of something.
Assassins opened November 14, 2021, at the Classic Stage Company and runs through January 29, 2022. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
