"Assassins" on Target

When a production of Assassins hits its target, it sometimes kills the applause. How do you clap when you're cringing?

In the 1990 musical by book writer John Weidman and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the characters are drawn from history, all the misfits who've aimed guns at U.S.Presidents from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. Their delusions make us laugh, but their earnest self-justifications can make us profoundly uncomfortable.

After a pause to show that the assassins' methods and views are not necessarily those of the audience, we cheered this past weekend at the Jennie Anderson Theatre in Marietta GA to tell the actors and musicians how we appreciated the expressive pitch-perfect voices, flawless performance of music that demanded precision, and commitment to playing characters who could easily have been presented as caricatures.

L-R: Byck, Guiteau, Fromme, Zangara, Booth, Oswald, Czolgosz, Moore, Hinckley

The cast made strong impressions:

• Michael Joshua Williams in a grimy Santa suit as unemployed tire salesman Samuel Byck in tears because he can't tell from the media what is true anymore;
• Lukas Chaviano as Charles Guiteau, with a warm smile and tireless optimism right up to the moment he faces the noose -- and then summons the will to accept that, too;
• Cameron Scofield as hippie Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Jessica Miesel as scatterbrained suburban housewife Sarah Jane Moore, abandoned by everyone else, bonding with each other over Charles Manson;
• Chase Sumner as college dropout John Hinckley, Jr., taunted by Fromme for never having a girl friend and joining her in a soft-rock duet addressed to their idols (Jodie Foster and Manson);
• Claudio Pestana as immigrant ditch-digger Giuseppi Zangara who "never had no chance" and doesn't care about his target "so long as it's king";
• Marcus Hopkins-Turner as factory worker Leon Czolgosz, dignified, lonely, brooding on the injustice of his position;
• Jordan Patrick as hapless Lee Harvey Oswald, with his soft admission, "yes," all he wants is for someone to care about him (even if it's hatred they feel); and
• Craig Smith as John Wilkes Booth, lamenting in the score's most beautiful musical passage "the country is not what it was / when there's blood in the clover" a few measures before he sings the score's ugliest lyric.

As quasi-emcees, Ithica Tell gave her rich low voice to the "Proprietor" in the opening song, and cheerful "Balladeer" Skyler Brown looked genuinely stricken when his optimistic paean to the American Dream is overwhelmed by "Another National Anthem" for "the ones who can't get in to the ballpark."

This was a "concert version" that didn't have, and didn't need, a set. Director Clifton Guterman made a striking and meaningful backdrop from a vast American flag on which images of the assassins' targets were projected. Under the flag, the orchestra sat in full view upstage of most of the action. Around a central platform just large enough to bear 11 actors, a semicircle of chairs gave the assassins a place to watch each others' scenes. In a nice touch, director Clifton Guterman suited each chair to the character and their time: an ornate white rattan chair for Booth, a 70s easy chair from the Hinckley family basement, and even an airplane seat for Byck, who planned to hijack a jet to drop on Richard Nixon's White House.

The effect of the assassins rising from their chairs to join Oswald on that platform was creepy enough to make me catch my breath, and yet it felt like what the whole show was heading to: the misfits who couldn't connect to anyone in their lives connect to each other through Oswald's assassination of Kennedy. Booth calls it "the real conspiracy."

The orchestra, conducted by Holt McCarley, sounded bigger than they were and better than I've heard outside of New York. As Sondheim often interweaves different musics for different characters to tell their stories (e.g., a Sousa march for American tourists plays parallel to a tarantella for the Italian assassin Zangara), it was fun to watch McCarley corral all the moving pieces through tempo changes to reach climactic points together -- gunshots, an electrocution, a hanging. Being able to see the orchestra was a plus.

Because this production didn't include supporting actors, assassins variously doubled as a soldier, a reporter, and bystanders. Without an actress to play Emma Goldman, this production cut the scene at a train station where Czolgosz offers to carry luggage for the socialist orator. Perceiving how the man is lonely and ashamed of his scars from his work in a furnace, she touches his face and tells him that his scars make him beautiful. It's the only tender moment in the script, and I missed it.

The cast shortage did give the actors the opportunity to play sympathetic characters for a song late in the show, "Something Just Broke." Sondheim interweaves stories from everyday Americans across the decades who recall where they were when they learned "the President's been shot." They didn't have to like the President to agree that "Something just spoke, / something I wish I hadn't heard."

The line acquired new resonance with the January 6 insurrection. I wish it hadn't.

Earlier Posts about Assassins
[See my Sondheim page for curated links to my articles about the composer, his craft, his colleagues, and his shows. I wrote about Joe Mantello's production of Assassins in 2004 with Neil Patrick Harris as both "Balladeer" and "Oswald." After seeing several productions around Atlanta, I wrote in 2012 how low budgets and even vocal weakness don't diminish the show's emotional impact. See Sondheim Mini-Festival in Atlanta.]