“We’d Have Been Left Bereft Of FDR!” | The cast of Assassins explains “How I Saved Roosevelt.”
DETAILS
ASSASSINS
Directed by Clinton Carew. Book by John Weidman, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Starring Joel Crichton, Jon Lachlan Stewart, Joshua Dalledonne, Paul Bellows. Timms Centre for the Arts (University of Alberta). To May 23 (7:30pm). Tickets available through TIX on the Square (420-1757/tixonthesquare.ca).
***1/2
With a cast of 20 actors, a 12-piece orchestra underneath the stage, and a plethora of dangling props, disco balls, and pulsing light effects framing the edges, nobody would accuse MFA candidate Clinton Carew of underselling his production of Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical-for-people-who-don’t-like-musicals. But when your subject is the various historical misfits who’ve tried to kill a U.S. president, as told through bombastic, tightly wound songs, ambition isn’t just recommended; it’s written into the piece’s DNA.
Things get off to a tantalizing start, as two carnival barkers entice various passersby into their uniquely treasonous midway game: step right up, try your luck, and shoot a president! Before long, a ragtag rogue’s gallery has assembled, each would-be assassin simmering with his or her own internal demons, and the visual incongruity is delicious. There’s an upper-class blowhard (Charles Guiteau), an acerbic Italian immigrant (Giuseppe Zangara), a pink-clad housewife (Sara Jane Moore) and her hippie cohort (Squeaky Fromme), a bitter failed actor (John Wilkes Booth), an ultra-awkward introvert (John Hinckley), a factory worker-turned-anarchist (Leon Czolgosz), and a fat man in a Santa suit (Sam Byck). One big name is missing, but he’ll make an appearance later on.
What do they have in common? In Sondheim and John Weidman’s formulation, the assailants are all marks in the giant con known as the American Dream. They worked hard and paid their dues, but recognition kept eluding them; the land of the free kept upping its price. Assassins creates a grand narrative of misguided vigilante justice, where Booth’s murder of Lincoln in 1865 sets the template that misfits for centuries to come would dutifully carry on.
But don’t forget: this is a musical, and a jaunty one at that. So as Guiteau approaches the gallows after killing President James Garfield in 1881 for not naming him ambassador to France, he interrupts his solemn hymn to break out in jazz hands and do a little softshoe. When Zangara tries and fails to kill FDR in 1933, a crowd of onlookers rush to a microphone to boast how they all personally saved the president’s life — though the song is so dense, and actor Farren Timoteo’s accent so thick, that most of the wordplay is completely lost.
Some of the songs fare better than others, mostly due to an unfortunate combination of a few weaker voices and a slightly too-loud orchestra. Neither Booth (Jon Lachlan Stewart) nor Guiteau (Andrew Mecready) command the stage the way they’re meant to, and perhaps not coincidentally, both sing too quietly. The nameless hippie troubadour/quasi-narrator (Joel Crichton) fares much better, belting out his sly commentary with gusto. In terms of straight acting, my personal favourites are Tara Brodin as Moore, who has moments of Kristen Wiig-like brilliance while bumbling towards shooting Gerald Ford, and Paul Bellows as Hinckley. Reagan’s would-be killer has the least material to work with of everyone, but Bellows oozes creepy desperation even while standing still, pulling at his shirt cuffs.
The last act of the show hones in on Joshua Dalledonne’s Lee Harvey Oswald, who is visited by all eight ghosts of assassination past and future while sitting in the soon-to-be-infamous Dallas book depository in 1963. Here the terrible legacy is revealed in full: Booth tells Oswald that he’s part of a larger chain, from Brutus in ancient Rome all the way down to Hinckley, who affirms that he read every available book on Oswald before plotting his own attack in 1981. It’s a chilly but fitting ending, the playful intrigue of the material tempered by the recognition that this is a chain that will, in all likelihood, never end.
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