The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
With 12 ‘killer’ songs, depth and humor, ‘Assassins’ dazzles
“Assassins,” the musical fantasia from John Weidman (book) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics and music), has it all: history, humor, depth, irony and metaphor. And it’s all on dazzling and disturbing display in Yale Repertory Theatre’s splendid production, deftly directed — or rather, mined — by James Bundy.
Musically, “Assassins” is a compendium of Americana, a revue of various popular styles spanning from the Civil War to the singer-songwriters of the 1970s, borrowing some “Hail to the Chief” and invoking Copland along the way. Textually, it lends voice, flesh and blood to the disgruntled masses that whiffed at their chance to win the jackpot on the skillo wheel at the Great American Bunko Game disguised as the American Dream.
Specifically, this bold piece explores nine characters who took their shots at U.S. presidents and, whether or not they silenced their targets, found infamy after happiness escaped them. Through the craft and inspired invention of Weidman and Sondheim, “Assassins” takes its audience along a roller-coaster ride where suspense, giddiness, horror and empathy rattle the soul.
“Assassins,” continuing through April 8 at the University Theatre, has been with us since its 1990 premiere off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon. Yet it seems that this chamber musical resounds deeper and louder with each passing year since John Hinckley, our most recent attacker, took unsteady aim at President Reagan in 1981. Perhaps this is because “Assassins” concerns the presidents’ assailants — “the suckers, for the pikers, the ones who might have been” who have been haunted by their own “muffled dreams,” as the
characters sing in “Another National Anthem.”
As Bundy said in these pages last week, strains of anger and entitlement radiate throughout the country from citizens who feel that the establishment has not just turned its back on them, but also sent them face-first into the muck with a humiliating kick in the pants. They have responded by taking a bead on the establishment, figuratively speaking, and blowing the face off its head.
“Assassins” starts with the Proprietor (a versatile and irresistible Austin Durant), a barker dressed like a sideshow strongman in Uncle Sam garb, peering from under his top hat and over his black handlebar mustache, menacingly at the audience, inviting customers to “come on and kill a president.” One by one, the nine principals enter and the game’s afoot. Though all of the characters have their focal scenes, John Wilkes Booth (a dashing and volatile Robert Lenzi), the assassins’ leader, has more stage time than his followers.
Booth shoots Lincoln, or literally at his projected image, and he’s instantly holed up in a barn, surrounded by soldiers promising to set the building ablaze. Booth, with the reluctant help of The Balladeer (Dylan Frederick), writes down his reasons for “slaying the tyrant” in order to establish his legacy as a patriot rather than a villain.
Soon enough, the other eight characters take their shots. Sara Jane Moore (a screwy Julia Murney) and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (a bughouse Lauren Molina) meet twice in a park to plot their ambush of Gerald Ford (Fred Inkley, a gem). All nine of the characters meet in a bar to wallow in communal misery, save Charles Guiteau (a delightfully loopy Stephen DeRosa), who proves an ardent self-promoter and guileless cheerleader for his fellow spirits. Fromme also visits Hinkley (Lucas Dixon), seemingly to tease him once he proves himself unwilling to interact, before they pair up for parallel versions of “Unworthy Of Your Love,” which Hinckley directs towards Jodie Foster and Fromme to Charles Manson.
The most stunning scenes belong to Sam Byck (the intensely hard-wired Richard R. Henry), who delivers two compactly exquisite monologues, the second of which sends him to BWI Airport to hijack a jet to crash into the Nixon White House. The conceit is that Byck records letters — suicide notes, really — to various celebrities (namely Leonard Bernstein here, and Nixon himself) that will doubtless go public after his death. As Byck, dressed in his disheveled Santa Claus costume, spouts trenchant streams of consciousness, sorrow and frustration in between swigs of Budweiser in a can, he seems to speak for a whole generation of marginalized people whose only mistake was believing in a failed society. Henry’s Byck will break your heart after inciting explosive laughter at his passion, confusion and humanity.
“Assassins” has only a dozen songs — anemic by big musical standards. Don’t be fooled — each song is, well, killer. “The Ballad of Guiteau,” sung by The Balladeer and Guiteau, is among the most astonishing for its exuberance and chill. Using Guiteau’s death-house letter as its source, Sondheim has President Garfield’s doomed assassin singing that he’s “going to the Lordy” as he stares at the noose from the bottom of the gallows. Leon Czolgosz (a brooding P.J. Griffith), Booth, Guiteau and Moore render “The Gun Song,” a barbershop quartet number, that’s equally chilling and ridiculous.
Musical director Andrea Grody leads a gorgeous, 13-piece orchestra that provides an earful of lush orchestrations and plumbs Sondheim’s score for all of its many nuances. David Dorfman (musical staging), Riccardo Hernandez (scenic designer), Ilona Somogyi (costumes), Yi Zhao (lighting), Nathan A. Roberts and Charles Coes (sound designers), and Michael Commendatore (projections) all complement Bundy and the cast to create a satisfying theatrical event.
Everybody’s got the right to be happy, as the misled characters sing at both ends of the musical. “Assassins” shows how these losers, misfits and malcontents become cornered by their own delusions, certainly. It also renders them emphatically.