an acolyte and self-described “lover and
slave” of Charles Manson, and Sara Jane
Moore ( Judy Kuhn), a square serial di-
vorcée with mysterious motives—didn’t
schmooze in life, but onstage they bond
over their daddy issues while using a
bucket of KFC chicken for target prac-
tice. Then, there’s Samuel Byck (Andy
Grotelueschen), the disgruntled crack-
pot who tried to hijack a plane and fly
it into Richard Nixon’s White House,
pouring out his troubles on a tape re-
cording that he intends to send to Leon-
ard Bernstein. (Sondheim has fun riff-
ing on “West Side Story”; if you’ve got
the rights, f launt ’em.) Byck may be
nuts—he wears a grungy Santa suit—
but his grievances don’t sound all that
unreasonable. The world is increasingly
unmanageable. There’s a hole in the ozone
layer; a Saudi prince has bought How-
ard Johnson’s. You can see where he’s
coming from.
When “Assassins” premièred, in 1990,
reaction to it was sharply divided; a re-
tooled revival, slated for 2001, was post-
poned for three years, for fear of offend-
ing audiences’ resurgent patriotism after
9/11. The current production was intended
for 2020; thematically, the delay has been
Doyle’s friend, though he faces other
challenges. Surrounded by the audience
on three sides, the C.S.C.’s peninsula of
a stage makes it hard to hear the per-
formers when they turn their backs, and
the quality of the sound was uneven the
afternoon I saw the show, with Pasquale’s
quiet menace, for instance, oddly muted
compared with Swenson’s antic, clarion
command. But the unusual space, with
its wooden roof and brick walls, makes
the production feel intimate, and the mu-
sicians who wander among the cast in
red, white, and blue jumpsuits give the
setting a square-dance atmosphere, with
a sound, heavy on the fiddle, that suits
Sondheim’s Americana inspirations.
“There’s another national anthem
playing / Not the one you cheer,” some-
one sings, late in the show. We know
that other anthem, laced with cynicism
and despair, and some of us like to sing
it, too. At the show’s end, an image of
the January 6th riot is projected above
the stage, but though Doyle’s message
seems to be plus ça change, the past we’ve
just watched makes an ill-fitting pre-
cedent for the uncharted present. We
know what it looks like for someone to
want to kill the person in charge. What
we don’t know is what happens when
the person in charge wants to kill us.
“Something just broke,” as the show
says. It won’t be fixed soon.A
s bright American myths are being
popped in “Assassins,” anemic En-
glish ones are sprouting like weeds in the
lustreless “Diana: The Musical” (at the
Longacre, directed by Christopher Ash-
ley, with music and lyrics by David Bryan
and additional lyrics by Joe DiPietro, who
wrote the book). The show’s accomplish-
ment is to make you wish, after two hours
of power-pop crooning, that the poor
Princess of Wales ( Jeanna de Waal) had
been allowed to keep some last shred of
her mystery and celebrated glamour. The
extraordinary circumstances that bro-
kered Diana’s marriage, and then trapped
her in it, are, as the show keeps pointing
out, those of a fairy tale gone wrong, but
the troubles of the marriage itself—a bad
match compounded by philandering—
could hardly be more banal. When, in
the first act, Diana considers ditching her
wedding, it’s too late; her name and image,
as one character says, are already being
used to sell tea towels and mugs. Now
they’re being used to sell tickets on Broad-
w a y. Plus ça change, indeed.
With documentaries, miniseries, mov-
ies, and now a musical, we’re reaching a
Diana saturation point. One odd new
perspective that this show has to offer is
its take on victimhood. Diana is presented
as a victim of circumstance, naturally, but
so are Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf )
and, weirdly, Queen Elizabeth ( Judy
Kaye), who is given an eleventh-hour
number in which she gets to feel sad about
abandonment issues in her own marriage.
Prince Philip, who, whatever his other
qualities, stuck by his wife for seventy-
three years, is really the abandoned one
here; we see neither hide nor hair of him.
The show’s villains are the paparazzi, who
are dressed like Inspector Gadget and do
some twirly dances (choreographed by
Kelly Devine) involving flashbulbs and
flaring trenchcoats, and Camilla Parker
Bowles (Erin Davie, bringing subtle feel-
ing to the bland proceedings), who man-
ages to once again upstage Diana by being
infinitely more interesting. Actually, the
story does turn out to be a fairy tale: Ca-
milla, deprived for years of her heart’s
true desire, finally gets her prince.