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Sam Hurwitt
Thursday, October 18, 2012
theidiolect.com
The presidential debates are upon us, Election Day
is just a few weeks away, and two local theater companies are
getting into the spirit of the thing by staging gleefully perverse
musicals about the U.S. presidency.
The 1990 musical Assassins is actually about the flipside
of the institution of the presidency—the extremely embittered
people who now and again try to kill the president, whether or
not they succeed. More than that, Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics
and John Weidman’s book posit this dark historical undercurrent
as the flipside of the American Dream: We’re promised that
anyone can make it in America, and if people come to feel that
this promise is a lie and someone has to pay for that, who better
than the president of the United States?
The show also portrays actual and attempted presidential assassins
from Lincoln slayer John Wilkes Booth down to thwarted Reagan
shooter John Hinkley Jr. as a family of oddly compelling misfits,
allowing them to interact with each other in a timeless space
regardless of whether they were even alive at the same time. Sondheim’s
songs ingeniously sample American musical styles of different
time periods to give a taste of the era from which each assassin
hails.
Shotgun Players’ production of Assassins is directed
by Susannah Martin, who helmed a dynamic Threepenny Opera
for the company in 2009. Nina Ball’s intriguing set displays
a gazebo plastered with vaudeville and circus posters and ringed
by an eight-piece orchestra. Theodore J.H. Hulsker’s sound
design adds ominous mechanical noises that are hard to identify
as signifying anything specific.
Jeff Garrett is a ghoulish, leering carny barker in a bowler and
candy-striped shirt, with a somewhat harsh singing voice. (The
fanciful costumes by Christine Crook are more entertaining than
convincing.) He’s always there to egg the assassins on,
often silently, while Kevin Singer’s Balladeer watches them
ruefully and tries to sing some sense into them. Singer has a
pleasant voice and earnestness as the Balladeer. Strapped around
his neck is a banjo that he sometimes plays, though he really,
really shouldn’t, as his leaden strumming interferes with
some otherwise delightful songs.
Galen Murphy-Hoffman’s John Wilkes Booth has a sweet voice
and seductive charisma that makes his fuming anti-Lincoln lament
oddly touching, despite a perplexing accent that starts off sounding
as much Slavic as Southern. He also acts as a sort of ringleader
for this motley crew, giving them a focus and outlet for their
discontent.
As most of the others vie for the mike to give their delightfully
bouncy musical testimonials of “How I Saved Roosevelt,”
Aleph Ayin fumes as dyspeptic, heavily accented Italian immigrant
Guiseppe Zangara, who seemingly gunned for FDR just because had
a stomach ache and figured he’d better shoot someone. Similarly
neutral about his target but with a deeper and more soulful discontent
is factory worker Leon Czolgosz, who acted because no one cared
about men like him being worked to death. Sung with mellifluous
intensity by Dan Saski, Czolgosz’s solemn refrain that “it
takes many men to make a gun” is deeply affecting in “Gun
Sung,” which becomes a delicious barbershop quartet with
Booth, Charles Guiteau and Sara Jane Moore.
Although her Emma Goldman feels a bit like a kid playing grownup,
Rebecca Castelli is very funny as the scatterbrained Moore, particularly
in her interaction with fellow attempted Ford assassin Squeaky
Fromme. Cody Metzer has an amusing wide-eyed zealotry as Manson
acolyte Fromme. Her love duet with Danny Cozart’s introverted
John Hinkley Jr. is one of the musical highlights of the show
(with her singing to Manson and him to Jodie Foster), despite
some harmonies that don’t quite connect.
Another favorite is “The Ballad of Charles Guiteau,”
an upbeat ode to the colorful Garfield assassin and cockeyed optimist
Charles Guiteau. With wild rat-tail mustachios pointing every
which way, Steven Hess is amusingly deluded as this man who firmly
believes that he can be whatever he sets his mind to, and woe
betide any who stand in his way, though in Hess’s portrayal
you can always glimpse the desperate insecurity lurking just under
the surface of his sunny bravado, especially as he defiantly cakewalks
to the scaffold.
Lee Harvey Oswald plays a central role in tying it all together,
as a sort of savior to elevate his colleagues from a sideshow
of misfits into a force of history, but how he enters is too much
of a spoiler if you’ve never seen the show. The actor who
plays him, however, is more convincing in his other role than
as the squirrelly and reluctant sniper.
Martin’s production is sometimes rough around the edges,
and the pace drags during the nonsinging scenes of assassins interacting,
but one thing that’s interesting about this staging is that
it does particularly well with the trickier parts of the show.
Ryan Drummond’s furiously bitter monologue as Sam Byck,
an out-of-work tire salesman who planned to fly a plane into the
White House to kill Richard Nixon, is startlingly compelling,
particularly because that section is usually one of the weak links
of the musical.
Similarly, Martin does something very clever and tremendously
effective with the weakest song, “Something Just Broke,”
about the nation’s collective shock and horror when a president
is killed. At first the where-I-was-when-I-heard testimonials
in song are heard only in prerecorded form, as the actors stand
around listening intently. When they do finally take over singing
the song live, the effect is haunting, like they’ve really
been swept up in something that’s already in the air. When
it segues back into a reprise of the seductive anthem “Everybody’s
Got the Right to Be Happy,” it’s chilling, because
the play really makes you feel the gunmen’s frustration
at feeling they’ve been swindled by life on the streets
that were supposed to be paved with gold. In a country that enshrines
the pursuit of happiness, “everybody’s got the right
to their dreams,” they sing. Those dreams are the American
dream, and when those dreams are crushed, some of the dreamers
are bound to take it personally.
