Assassins. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by
John Weidman. Directed by Kelly Roberts and Grant Pegg. Musical director
Alexander Unikowski. Everyman Theatre. Belconnen Theatre. To Sept 21.
Having been a Sweeney Todd tragic since being lucky enough
to encounter it on its first London run in 1980 (Denis Quilley and Sheila
Hancock, fabulous…) I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to get to
Assassins. Everyman Theatre’s rough and energetic production makes the wait
worth it.
It’s a wild and surreal look at assassins and would-be
assassins of American presidents set in a kind of carnival shooting gallery. There’s
not much talking but a lot of mad Sondheim songs with a small orchestra around
the back of the stage behind the rough set and even rougher garish lighting. And
there is a sense of history and its tendency to repeat itself.
Of course the troupe has to be led by Abraham Lincoln’s
assassin John Wilkes Booth (Jarrad West in a rather strange wig). The rest
include President McKinley’s assassin Leon Frank Czolgosz (Isaac Gordon), John Hinckley
Jr (Will Collett) who tried to
kill Reagan, Jonathan Rush as President Garfield’s rather fey killer Charles
Guiteau, Joel Hutchins as Guiseppe Zangara who attempted the life of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, Jim Adamik as Samuel Byck, who attempted to hijack a plane and
eliminate Nixon by crashing it into the White House. Then there’s the laid back
Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (Belle Nicol) who had an unsuccessful go at killing
President Ford, Sara Jane Moore (Tracy Noble) complete with swinging handbag,
who attempted the same a little later and the ambiguous Balladeer (Pippin
Carroll).
You see what I mean about a history lesson. If you’re old
enough to remember the wall to wall flickering grey and white coverage of
Kennedy’s death or if you’ve followed the Lincoln trail into Ford’s Theatre in
Washington where Booth shot the president during a performance of Our American
Cousin and the basement museum still displays bloodstained relics, then there’s
two assassinations you can be sure you know about. But some of the others are
more obscure to a non-American audience or have slipped from memory.
However, the show soon gleefully fills you in and although
West’s John Wilkes Booth towers above the others in some scenes, it’s the more
obscure ones that start to engage. And Lee Harvey Oswald creeps up on you.
There are forceful performances all round and a sense of
gleeful teamwork, driven by Alexander Unikowski and his upstage band of musicians
shaping Sondheim’s eccentric score. If the singers don’t always quite reach the
level of precision needed they make up for it in attack and energy.
The use of the Kennedy footage late in the piece is a
debatable choice. It effectively upstages anything the show is doing at that
point. On the other hand it presents something of the terrible realities that
assassins’ choices can lead to. And it certainly makes the laughter die away.
One of the show’s main songs says, ‘Everybody’s got the
right to be happy’. But not at this cost.
Great Sondheim, not to be missed.
Alanna Maclean
