[ssba]
Assassins
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Pico Playhouse
Through Sept. 27
RECOMMENDED:
In the 4th century B.C., a villainous thug, Herostratus, set fire to the tomb of Artemis. His reason? He had been a nonentity his entire life, and by committing this crime, he knew he would be remembered. Of course, the Greek judges, in their wisdom, executed him, and passed a law forbidding his name ever being mentioned again – but that didn’t stop him entering the history books and gaining the eternal fame (at least amongst dusty scholars of the classics) that even his now-forgotten judges never achieved.
The deranged murderers in Stephen Sondheim’s great musical about U.S. presidential assassins, Herostratans all, would absolutely understand the reasoning that drove the classical arsonist. For they are driven by the same motivation as Herostratus: the desire to make their mark in a world that has essentially written them off as useless losers. Since they can’t accomplish fame by doing good, they conceive and act on the worst thing they can think of.
Productions of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins are generally staged on a set that resembles a circus sideshow. A character called The Proprietor narrates. He resembles a carnival huckster and sells pistols instead of popcorn and cotton candy.
However, director Dan Fishbach’s crisp, ironically nuanced production instead reinvents the musical’s setting to what we suspect is a basement annex somewhere in Hell. Alex Kolmanovsky’s calculatedly grotty set consists of brick walls, hacks of which have been stripped away to reveal peepholes for extras and chorus-members to stare, Kilroy-like, at the action. It also helps explain the surreal conceit of having all the historical characters from different ages interacting with each other: John Wilkes Booth having a chat with Lee Harvey Oswald; Squeaky Fromme sniping at John Hinckley.
The idea of a musical based on the lives of president-killers should be too nutsy to succeed, yet Sondheim (and book writer John Weidman) create a darkly wise piece from bizarre historical elements, with a result that’s a powerful, trenchant statement on American desperation. This is a country, Sondheim seems to say, that honors winners and tells the losers to get lost. Here, the losers rise up and get what they think they deserve. The songs, while rarely boasting Sondheim’s greatest and most popular melodies, are engrossingly wise, from the operatic “Ballad of Booth,” to the quirky, yet despairing “Ballad of Guiteau.”
Performances in Fishbach’s production (musical direction by Anthony Lucca) occasionally suffer from voices that strain to reach Sondheim’s highest notes, yet there’s something nicely homespun about the effect, given the absence of artificial amplification (a rarity in musicals these days), and the live band nicely crafts the mood of a county fair, albeit a mighty dark one.
Travis Rhett Wilson crafts a beautifully pompous John Wilkes Booth, whose arrogance interestingly contrasts with the flashes of angry insanity that truly motivate him. His rendition of “Ballad of Booth,” remonstrating with Nick Tubbs’s excellent Balladeer over whether it was politics or ego that drove Booth to kill Lincoln, is terrific. Also wonderful is Jeff Alan-Lee’s amusingly weasely turn as the ridiculously deluded Charles (killer of President Garfield) Gateau, and Sean Benedict’s strangely sensitive, out-of-his-depth Lee Harvey Oswald. Personal favorite moment of this show is the bizarre love song featuring Claire Adams’s amusingly spooky Squeaky (attempted killer of Gerald Ford) Fromme and Zach Lutsky’s taciturn John Hinckley: They sing to each other, but Fromme is wooing Charlie Manson and Hinckley is serenading Jodie Foster – the mingled romanticism and lunacy is a sight to see.
Pico Playhouse, 10508 Pico Blvd, W.L.A.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Sept 27. (310) 204-4440, https://picoplayhouse.com. Running time: 2 hrs., 15 minutes with intermission
