Fame and infamy.
Once separate phenomena. How quaint.
Fame no longer requires (if it ever did) a moral component—an inconvenient obstacle to our embrace of celebrity. Infamy, in fact, is fame's grandest subset, outright villainy large and small nearly the price of admission in the tabloid-driven age.
So why should eyebrows arch at Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins? But some will. Some have since the musical about murderers and would-be murderers of American presidents debuted off-Broadway in 1990 (and revived last year on Broadway). Darkly fascinating and morbidly funny, Assassins is both a confirmation and condemnation of celebrity culture. Yet it's so much more, as is nearly every Sondheim creation. And Stage Door Entertainment admirably unearths those swirling subtexts throughout its mesmerizing translation—recommended for "mature audiences"—in Summerlin.
Assassins unsettles, exploring the roiling rage beneath the American Dream that drove a clutch of failed dreamers into seething extremism to find their fame through infamy by killing the official Dream Keeper, the U.S. President Of The Moment. As Lincoln-slayer John Wilkes Booth (Cory Benway) tells us, perverting Arthur Miller, "Attention must be paid!" Blowing away shopkeepers or unfaithful lovers, he insists, makes one merely a killer. But murderers of chief execs, he boasts, are elevated to "assassins." Now that's respect for a genuine accomplishment.
This show refuses to let us slip through the safe mind-set that these are merely lunatics, separated from us by that handy catchall of "insanity." We're forced to confront and consider such unconscionable conduct through their perspective, that those America churns up in its wake could be, if not justified in their actions, at least understood for their disillusionment and despair.
Weidman's book is musically supported by Sondheim's score: melodically complex, tonally disturbing and absolutely un-hummable, yet thoroughly hypnotic—a tight-glove fit.
"Shoot the Prez! Win a prize!" says a sign over a carnival booth, would-be assassins wandering by, as this plot-less play opens. Yet for all its seeming narrative disconnect—it's a series of vignettes, characters hopscotching across time and history to interact with one another—Assassins hangs together on the strength of its unifying theme, on the compulsion that binds them, so their common coaxing, cajoling and conversing feel like some twisted fantasy we didn't realize would fascinate us so in the darkest corner of our curiosity.
Freed from linear storytelling, and on Heather Grindstaff's simple set of steps and blocks, director Terrence Williams lets his actors roam the range of explosive emotions the piece requires, yet contains and modulates these set pieces so the assassins' taunts, tirades, delusions and self-pity pop out to surprise us—and make us squirm:
Booth, in the aftermath of Lincoln's shooting, declares, "I killed the man who killed my country!" and grows ever angrier at the balladeer (a one-man Greek chorus played with appropriate pomposity by Jason Andino) for his easy moralizing, because Assassins is at least partially about rejecting lazy self-righteousness to account for murderous motivations. Even at the season's opening gun, Benway's Booth, a vainglorious Vesuvius of outrage spiced with swagger and elegance and a nearly operatic voice, sets a high bar. He is breathtaking. As Santa-suited (how he was dressed as a protestor) Samuel Byck, who was captured and killed himself before he could crash a plane into Nixon's White House, Sean Critchfield is a rambling, ramshackle force of nature, recording a hilariously chilling rant to Leonard Bernstein, urging him to compose more "love songs" for the world as his poisonous wrath mounts. By monologue's end, he's a rabid wolverine chewing through a rotting carcass.
Brian Scott brings an outsized flair to Charles Guiteau, who was set on being "ambassador to Frooonce." Rejected, he shoots President James Garfield in the back, then cakewalks to his hanging. As played by David M. Tapper, William McKinley's murderer, Leon Czolgosz, is a tortured anarchist. Katie Harper and Judy Lombino as inept Gerald Ford stalkers Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme play a freaky, frequently funny game of matching neuroses/psychoses. And Fromme and Kyle Andrew Van Son's John Hinckley sing a surreal duel ode to their objects of derangement, Charlie Manson and Jodie Foster, as their slide-show images float across a split screen.
By the time the assassins gather to urge Lee Harvey Oswald (Ben Bedenbaugh) to carry out the most convulsive assassination of the media age—and therefore, of all the ages—to validate their own acts, Assassins reaches its riveting, discomforting apex.
Assassins isn't for everyone. Those unprepared for an aggressive assault on black-and-white morality and conventional artistry, give it a pass.
Everyone else, give it a shot.