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Robert Hurwitt
Published 4:48 p.m., Sunday, October 7, 2012
The San Francisco
Chronicle
Don't get me wrong, but the singing, dancing presidential
killers of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's "Assassins"
are looking pretty good at the Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage.
Not in the sense that you're led to condone what they've done
or tried to do. But the unsettling 1990 musical is Sondheim working
at the top of his composer-lyricist form, matched by Weidman's
provocative vaudeville script. And Susannah Martin's taut, close-up
staging, which opened Friday, captures much of the show's capacity
to shock, amuse, beguile and astonish.
Not all, by any means. Martin could use a few stronger, more flexible
voices in her cast, and musical director David Möschler's
eight-piece band, though surprisingly deft, can't do full justice
to the complexities of Sondheim's all-American score. But Martin's
smart stagings and stripped-down approach make even the technical
deficiencies enhance the story and theme.
"Assassins" is one of Sondheim's more compact musicals.
Martin makes it more so by dispensing with the usual ensemble.
Instead, the chorus and subsidiary characters are played by the
same actors who embody nine of the men and women who've tried
to assassinate a president of the United States - four of whom
succeeded. The role switches do more than work like a charm. Their
effect dovetails with Weidman's carnival-sideshow structure to
reinforce the idea that we may not be as different from these
people as we'd like to think.
Some, of course, are more famous than others. Silken-toned Galen
Murphy-Hoffman cuts a would-be matinee idol-dapper figure as John
Wilkes Booth, desperately trying to write a self-justifying manifesto
for killing Lincoln. His song-battle with Kevin Singer's resonant
Balladeer puts the show on firm footing and Booth's legacy in
a provocative perspective. That pays off in the unsettling climax,
when Singer becomes Lee Harvey Oswald.
Steven Hess poignantly sings and cakewalks to glory as Garfield's
assassin, the shakily upbeat entrepreneur Charles Guiteau, in
Erika Chong Shuch's brightly choreographed execution scene. Dan
Saski is eerily empathetic as Leon Czolgosz, the hard-luck worker
who shot McKinley.
Martin sharply shapes the comic-tragic juxtapositions to heighten
the harrowing impact of the execution of Aleph Ayin's fervent
Giuseppe Zangara (who tried to shoot Franklin Roosevelt) and the
paranoid ramblings of would-be Nixon assassin Sam Byck (the impressive
Ryan Drummond). Cody Metzger and Danny Cozart don't quite achieve
the melodic riches of the Squeaky Fromme-John Hinckley duet "Unworthy
of Your Love," Sondheim's loveliest and creepiest love song.
But Metzger's Fromme and the golden-toned Rebecca Castelli's bumbling
Sara Jane Moore capture the comedy of their botched attempts.
Martin keeps the action compact as Nina Ball's tawdry carousel
set begins to resemble the cylinder of a pistol. The tension builds
inexorably through Guiteau's death to a riveting climax with the
ensemble "Something Just Broke" after the fatal day
in Dallas.
The way Martin's assassins morph into a stunned populace underscores
the musical's most disturbing theme. These people haven't been
just aberrations. They're part of the fabric of our nation.
