Assassins

Finally caught "Assassins" at a production at UNC. Interesting concept. Certainly not one of my favorite Sondheim works, but, also not my least favorite. What did you think of it? Did you see either the original Off Broadway or Roundabout rework?

Updated On: 4/21/14 at 07:47 PM

I saw the Roundabout production as well as Oxford's production at the 1999 Edinburgh festival and a couple of small local productions. I like the concept and love the score, but the book and structure somehow cause it to drag for me (like the inconsistent use of the Balladeer, for example). I thought adding Something Just Broke was a huge mistake in the Roundabout production that halted any momentum the show had and worked against the concept of the entire piece. What made the show interesting in the first place was confining the subject to the minds and motivations of the assassins (or wanna-be assassins) not the reaction of the general public to their efforts. The singular idea in the song is pretty much expressed by the characters in the final scene, but from a much more intriguing perspective.

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Updated On: 4/22/14 at 12:36 PM

"Something Just Broke" was in the production that reopened the Donmar Warehouse in 1992 unless I am mistaken.

I am firmly in the camp that the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald should be played by separate actors.

I think it's an interesting piece. I think that it is its own worst enemy. A bunch of freaks try to kill the President while pretending they're not freaks. I think it would have had more punch if the characters were less cartoonish.

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Updated On: 4/22/14 at 06:45 PM

The local Red Herring Theater troupe here in Columbus Ohio did a really good production of it a few months ago and they doubled the Balladeer with Oswald and it worked very well. The transformation was done onstage with the other actors blocking him from view and a few little changes to his costume and he had switched characters. The blending of the characters as the Balladeer being an alter ego to Oswald made sense in their staging. I thought it was a great production of an underrated and thought-provoking show.

The problem with the Balladeer as Oswald is that it leaves no surprise. It's like the Emcee in Cabaret also being Sally Bowles.

I saw a production where in the very end the audience is led to believe that the Balladeer might be enticed to be the next assassin. Which if the Balladeer is Oswald that doesn't work.

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We've seen 3 productions over the years, including the Roundabout Revival. We keep going back in hopes that the next production will prove us wrong-- that this is just a brilliant collection of songs in desperate need of a coherent play. It has an MC for the 1st number who is promptly overthrown for the Balladeer in Scene 2-- why? It has a series of characters who keep banging into each other with no development or character arc-- they simply ARE, frozen in their assigned archetypes like tabloid celebrities in a wax museum.

It isn't the subject matter we have any difficulty with-- we love dark theater topics, and welcome the idea of grappling with America's obsession with murder and 15 minutes of fame in one package. But to us, only Sondheim came up with anything worth saying-- and spectacularly so. Weidman's work was left in the dust.

I saw the ORIGINAL... I think it was at the OLD Playwrights Horizon if I remember. It was a really small stage, and a small house. I somehow got to usher to see the show. It was amazing. What a production!

Thanks, Eric, as always, for the cogent and comprehensive analysis.

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On a basic level I guess the point is that any person could turn into an assassin? Or, something?

Almost, but not quite. If you look at the Balladeer's first number (with Booth), you get the basic "lone nut" theory of political assassination. It's what we like to tell ourselves, whether it's a presidential assassin, a terrorist, or a mass murder who shoots up a school. "Well, that was just an aberration. He must have been crazy!"

The argument of the play is that such outbursts of violence aren't accidental exceptions, but actually a logical consequence of the disaffection sown by our own myths. We say "every boy (and now girl) can grow up to be president", but that's not really true. We may have a little more social mobility than some countries, but now, as always, only a very few get to part of the nation's elite (in any field).

And that can tend to leave the rest of the people feeling very betrayed. Now most of us don't start shooting strangers, thank God; instead we complain bitterly about corrupt leaders and take shallow reassurance from the fiction put out by Fox News. ("You see? It's not my fault I'm not more successful. The system is rigged by liberals and minorities!")

Where the play stumbles, in my opinion, is at the end when the voice of the American dream, the Balladeer, is overwhelmed by the miscreants and evicted from the stage. I think (and this was confirmed to me by one friend of Mr. Sondheim) that the authors want to say that Americans' sense of entitlement can swamp even the most constructive optimism. That's why we get "Another National Anthem", because in a non-literal sense the old one is out of date.

I don't think that final reversal is at all clear and "Something Just Broke" doesn't help matters.

But it's not a sloppy or "failed play". It's a complex and often brilliant political musical in the best, Brechtian sense of the word (no matter how many times Sondheim gives interviews saying he hates Brecht).

I apologize for the lecture. I've come to love the show very much.

To put it more simply, ASSASSINS explained the Tea Party two decades before the movement began.

Excellent post, Gaveston, I agree on all counts. That final reversal should be clearer, but it's still an utterly thrilling show,

I would like to see a production of Assassins in which the role of the Balladeer is doubled with Lee Harvey Oswald, but they are not played as the same character. I think it would be an interesting contrast to see the same man first get scared off by the Assassins, then be enticed by their prospects, but it doesn't really make sense as one character arc.

I like the inclusion of "Something Just Broke" because the piece spends so much time trying to get us to sympathize to some extent with presidential assassins that if it succeeds, we have lost a bit of perspective on what exactly they are doing. We are reminded of what is at stake, which makes the finale all the more chilling. Yes, it is a strong shift in tone, and it should be. I think another argument for the song could be made in that it forces the Assassins to acknowledge the results of their actions, which makes their final reaffirmation (is that the right word?) of their actions all the more chilling.

As for the "message" of the piece, I really don't think it should be interpreted as "this could be any one of us." For much of the piece, we are led along that track as we try to understand why these people took these actions, but the inclusion of "Something Just Broke" should remind us why those characters could never be us. So then we are left with this image of crazy people firing guns, knowing full well the terrible things they are doing to the nation, and having no remorse. This is even scarier than the possibility that they could be us--they are people without empathy who could crack at any moment. And they have guns.

Any production that takes the approach of "they could be any one of you" will fail because most of these characters were not driven to the extremes that would be necessary for most people to kill. It's not "I was about to be raped" or "he had a knife," it's "I wanted to promote the sales of my book" and "I did it to prove my love." The first assassination in the show is motivated by politics, and the reasoning gets more and more preposterous until it's little more than "I just had a feeling." And that's really frightening.

To be clear, I'm not trying to say that "they could be any one of us" is or should be the takeaway of the piece. However, I do think there is an effort made to get the audience to see the assassins as people...people who were driven to extremes, mind you, but people. The relation to the audience is not through the attempt to assassinate the President, but through the pursuit of the American dream. It means something different to them than it does to us, but there's still a common thread. And identifying with something about someone isn't the same as sympathizing with them, but it does make you sit back and consider who these people were. I think that's terrifying for a lot of people, more terrifying than the idea of randomly insane people doing insane things...it is for me, anyway.

"To put it more simply, ASSASSINS explained the Tea Party two decades before the movement began."

Oh brother! Words fail me as to how really uninformed that statement is.

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