The New Yorker - USA (2021-11-29)

92 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021

the theatre

NOTORIOUS

President killers and Princess Diana find musical immortality.

by alexandra schwartz

ILLUSTRATION BY MANDDY WYCKENS

T

he pleasure to be had from the
stripped-down revival of Stephen
Sondheim’s “Assassins” at the Classic Stage
Company (under the direction of John
Doyle) is so giddy and deep that it oc-
curred to me only after I had left the the-
atre, with the show’s jauntier melodies
still ringing in my ears, that it might count
as guilty, too. “Assassins,” which skips
through more than a century of bloody
American history in a little less than two
hours, is about losers: the desperate and
the deluded, people who were stepped
on and ground down until they decided
that their only recourse was to grab a gun
and point it at the President. “Free coun-
try/Means they listen to you,” the show’s

opening number goes, and we do listen,

thanks to Sondheim’s music and lyrics.

(The show’s book is by John Weidman,

based on a great, perverse idea by Charles

Gilbert, Jr.) Try not to hum along as John

Wilkes Booth (Steven Pasquale), John

Hinckley, Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat), Ly-

nette (Squeaky) Fromme (Tavi Gevin-

son), and the rest of this band of mur-

derous misfits serenade you with their

conviction that, per Thomas Jefferson,

“everybody’s got the right to be happy.”

That this pitch-dark show should be

so light on its feet reverses the recent

trend of musical revivals that cast a chilly

shadow over familiar song and sunshine.

In 2019, Daniel Fish turned “Oklahoma!”

from a celebration of American expan-
sionism into a grim treatise on Ameri-
can selfishness and brutality. “Carousel,”
with its themes of violence and murder,
grew gloomier still in Jack O’Brien’s 2018
production. But “Assassins,” which deals
with the slimy underbelly of American
dreams, couldn’t be more upbeat. That’s
what gives the show its eerie power. These
grandiose lunatics and disappointed ide-
alists have us grinning along from the
get-go; they all sought fame, that elixir
of eternal life, and Sondheim has given
it to them. So who gets the last laugh?
According to the Balladeer (the ap-
pealing Ethan Slater), we do. Armed,
like Woody Guthrie, not with a pistol
but with a guitar, he guides us through
this particular circle of the American un-
derworld with optimistic sanity, starting
at the barn where an injured John Wilkes
Booth is hiding out. Booth wants it re-
corded, for posterity, that he put a bul-
let through Abraham Lincoln’s head
to avenge the South, to save the nation
from tyranny, yada yada yada. The Bal-
ladeer has other ideas. “Some say it was
your voice had gone/Some say it was
booze,” he taunts. “They say you killed
a country, John/Because of bad reviews.”
He’s more sympathetic to the downtrod-
den anarchist Leon Czolgosz (Brandon
Uranowitz), a factory worker whose fu-
rious analysis of capitalist oppression is
spot on—though his assassination of
William McKinley doesn’t do much to
stop it—and to Charles Guiteau (Will
Swenson, electric with comic charisma),
an unhinged self-promoter who cake-
walks his way to the gallows after he offs
James Garfield for refusing to name him
Ambassador to France. “Lots of mad-
men/have had their say,” the Balladeer
reassures us, “but only for a day.” Because
this is Sondheim, and all harmonies are
bound to curdle into dissonance, you can
guess that that message won’t stand up
to scrutiny. By the end of the show, the
Balladeer will have shed his hopeful pep
and, in a moment of pure horror, trans-
formed into Lee Harvey Oswald.
There’s something of a “Breakfast
Club” feel to this ragtag crew, united in
the detention hall of history. Booth sug-
gests to the luckless Italian immigrant
Giuseppe Zangara (Wesley Taylor) that
he try to cure his intractable stomach
problems by shooting F.D.R. Gerald
A revival of Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical “Assassins” couldn’t be more upbeat. Ford’s pair of would-be killers—Fromme,