SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

Leon Czolgosz, assassination of President William McKinley – Kris Manuel

 

John Hinckley, attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan – Rob Dowton

 

Charles Guiteau, assassination of President James Garfield – Robert Hannouch

 

Giuseppe Zangara, attempted assassination of President–elect Franklin D Roosevelt – Joseph Claus

 

Samuel Byck, attempted assassination of President Richard Nixon – Ben David Mann

 

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford – Lydia Jenkins

 

Sarah Jane Moore, attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford – Phillipa Cookman

 

John Wilkes Booth, assassination of President Abraham Lincoln – James Meunier

 

Balladeer/Lee Harvey Oswald, assassination of President John F Kennedy – Paul Allison

 

Emma Goldman, anarchist known for her political activism who also interacted several times with Leon Czolgosz – Ariane Wildberger

 

Proprietor – Steven MacGillvray

 

David Herold, accomplice to John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln/James Blaine, Secretary of State who received a deluge of letters from Charles Guiteau/resident James Garfield, twentieth President of the United States/President Gerald Ford, thirty-eighth President of the United States/Billy, Sara Jane Moore's son/Bystanders – Ross Barnes, Suzanna Kempner, Tom Little, Steven MacGillvray, Ariane Wildberger

 

Music and lyrics by STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Book by JOHN WEIDMAN
Based on an original idea by Charles Gilbert Jnr

Matt Ryan director

Everybody’s got the right to be happy

Everybody’s got the right to their dreams

Everybody gets a shot,

Come on, and kill a President

 

And with that we are plunged into the netherworld of Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 show, Assassins, where, according to John Weidman, these things happen in America because, “…we live in a country whose most cherished national myths, at least as currently propagated, encourage us to believe that in America our dreams not only can come true, but should come true, and that if they don’t someone or something is to blame.” There but for 1776, go we. Ah, yes, the American Dream, I want it, I’ll get it, I can’t have it? No way, boom!

 

This show not only sets out to prove Weidman’s statement but demonstrate that the spirit of every assassin, or would–be assassin, is in the others, spurring them onwards to ever greater acts of folly. But a musical about such things?

 

If you know your Sondheim this shouldn’t, really, come as any surprise. Think of Anyone Can Whistle – a show about a corrupt local government – Sweeney Todd – the story of a mass murderer – or, at the opposite extreme, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – set in ancient Rome. Sondheim casts his net far and wide in his search for a plot, and invariably, and here I am writing with hindsight, succeeds.

 

In one act, playing for just short of two hours, we are given potted biographies of the malcontents (for want of a better word) and the way they interact together. Starting with John Wilkes Booth – a marvellous turn by James Meunier – we are given his reasons for the assassination and his subsequent desperation to write an explanation for his act. Oddly, here he commits suicide, by gun, whereas in reality he was shot by Union soldiers, eight days after the assassination. Poetic licence I suppose. The part of Booth, and Menuier’s performance, were so powerful that the other characters seemed rather small scale by comparison.

 

Kris Manuel’s Leon Czolgosz was a man alone, fanatical and desperate. Someone, perhaps, whom we should pity. He died in the electric chair, his last words being, "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime."

 

Rob Dowton gave his John Hinckley just the right amount of nuttiness – he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. He is still held under institutional psychiatric care.

 

Robert Hannouch found Charles Guiteau’s disillusionment, which led to his assassination of James Garfield. The trial was one of the first cases in American Law where the Insanity defense was employed. "The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him" Guiteau shouted at his trial, but he was still hanged. Here, I felt that Sondheim hadn’t fully drawn a character who might actually have been delusional and thus not responsibe for his actions. But this is a fairly short musical and much had to omitted.

 

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was a member of the Manson Family and she failed to assassinate Gerald Ford because her gun had no bullets in the firing chamber! Sentenced to life imprisonment, she was released last August. Lydia Jenkins played her, marvellously, as a west coast air–head. Hers was the fun turn in the show, and she makes a fine comidienne. 17 days after Fromme’s botched assassination attempt Sarah Jane Moore tried again. Phillipa Cookman understood Moore’s claim, made shortly before her release from prison, that "she regretted her actions, which she said were motivated by radical revolutionary politics.” (CNN News 31 December 2007) Cookman captured, exactly, the nature of the woman who obviously wanted to be a contender. For the rest, the performances were as near perfect as one could want them to be. Paul Allison was especially impressive as Lee Harvey Oswald, overcome with doubts about his impending action.

 

With a pit band to die for, under the direction of Dan Bowling, this was a stunning evening in the theatre, but not, perhaps, an easy one. The score is packed with good tunes, and clever orchestrations and, despite the surprising subject matter, it is a fine show but one which, I suppose, will never be as popular as A Little Night Music, which this ensemble is also performing this week, in honour of Sondheim’s 80^thbirthday this year. I shall report on that next week.

 

Bob Briggs