The Assassins’ narrator is forced out of the action too. In
scene 15, as he tries to moralize about America as a country
where the mailman can win the lottery and the usherette can
become a rock star, the gathered Assassins advance upon him
and drive him from the stage. Then they are free to sing “an-
other national anthem” without hindrance, and this modulates
into the country-and-western ballad that Lee Harvey Oswald
is listening to in the next scene, as he considers suicide in
the Texas Book Depository. (In most productions, Oswald is
played by the same actor as the Balladeer, further emphasizing
the displacement of authority.) In the Oswald scene, omnis-
cience is taken over by Booth and the other assassins, who
know Oswald’s complete story and can read his mind. They
talk him into killing President Kennedy as a way of justifying
those assassins who came before and making possible those as-
sassins who will come later. It is one of the most nerve-wracking
scenes in modern drama, a moment when the implication that
the assassins are heroes worthy of this much attention is fully
dramatized, and it comes about after the moralizing Balladeer
is driven from the action. The problem of omniscience has
been enlarged into a sort of nightmare of misplaced authority
among the rest of the cast.^9
The Set
The contemporary musical has brought a new form of omnis-
cience into the picture, the omniscience of the set. Stage tech-
nology has advanced to the point where the set can move itself
into position before the eyes of the audience, as though magic
or the almighty were creating the effect for us, and this miracle
of backstage inventiveness can overwhelm song-and-dance per-
formance and become the new groundwork or matrix of the
musical. Do modern musicals sometimes seem ponderous and
NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 155
(^9) Sondheim’s use of the narrator in Pacific Overturesis especially deft. He is a
reciter (from the Kabuki theatre tradition), knowing more than the other char-
acters but decidedly not knowing everything.