There was something Ozymandias-like about “Assassins,” and the way it arrived at Playwrights Horizons. For weeks, it’s been common knowledge that the show—which has music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, a book by John Weidman (who collaborated with Sondheim on “Pacific Overtures”), direction by Jerry Zaks, orchestration by Paul Gemignani, an all-star design team (Paul Gallo, William Ivey Long, and Loren Sherman), and a cast that includes Victor Garber, Jonathan Hadary, and Terrence Mann—is sold out for every performance of its extremely limited run at the raisin-box-sized theatre. There’s been a quality of “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” in the way people involved with the show have carried on about it. A notice posted outside the box office tells you at great length (in a very serious-looking font) about the procedures for getting standby tickets, and the woman I talked to when I called the box office to ask what time “the Sondheim” lets out, seemed to feel that I hadn’t spoken of the work with sufficient respect. “Assassins,” she corrected me sternly—as though she were saying “Faust.”
But by now almost everyone will have heard that the latest Sondheim isn’t all that the mystique cracked it up to be. Actually, it’s considerably worse. Moreover, what’s wrong with it goes beyond what one has come to think of as Sondheim’s chronic second-act problem. Everything about the show seems predictable, familiar, or inane, starting with the opening sight gag—a funfair shooting gallery (“HIT THE PREZ AND WIN A PRIZE”)—and going straight through to the embarrassing climax, which has John Wilkes Booth quoting “Death of a Salesman” to Lee Harvey Oswald, and the spirits of assassins past and future converging on the Texas School Book Depository to encourage Oswald and supply him with a long-range rifle. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity; but some people, on discovering that it isn’t, go crazy and become celebrity-murderers: so runs the show’s thesis. It’s not a very interesting idea, and Sondheim hasn’t managed to put any spin on it.
Given the nature of Sondheim’s interests and his gift for the panoramic, what one had expected from this musical was a historical and cultural mosaic held together by verbal and musical motif and by Sondheim’s offbeat, cynical vision. Instead, what we’re given is a high-school pageant. Weidman’s book offers little about its subjects beyond the cursory facts noted on a crib sheet handed out with the Playbill. There are portraits of Booth (Mr. Garber) as failed actor and jealous brother (a joke about bad reviews is repeated over and over), and of John Hinckley (Greg Germann) and Squeaky Fromme (Annie Golden) as misguided hero-worshippers. There are pratfalls involving Gerald Ford (for the simple) and in-jokes about Leonard Bernstein’s score for “West Side Story” (for the sophsticated). And (for the truly thoughtful) there’s a song about gun control. The show lasts ninety minutes (without an intermission) and features eight songs. These are sung or led by a footloose Balladeer, Patrick Cassidy, wearing overalls and a Greek fisherman’s cap—who knows why? Most have non-titles because they have no point. There’s “The Ballad of Booth,” “The Ballad of Czolgosz” (McKinley’s assassin, played by Mr. Mann), and “The Ballad of Guiteau” (Garfield’s, played by Mr. Hadary). A puerile ditty called “How I Saved Roosevelt” makes the point that eyewitness accounts of historical events tend to be self-glorifying and unreliable. But cleverness—the main thing we have come to expect from Sondheim (along with a certain amount of self-indulgence and sentimentality)—is lacking. There’s no structure, no conceit—nothing tying together this hodgepodge of only superficially connected incidents. People talk and talk and talk, and you think, When are they going to sing? And then they do, and you think, Why did they bother?
The mistake seems to have been to try to use popular-song forms to tell stories from history. We learn nothing about John Hinckley or Squeaky Fromme by having them sing a soft-rock love duet addressed (by him) to Jodie Foster and (by her) to Charles Manson. Most of the songs sound like self-parody—a whiff of the opening number from “Merrily We Roll Along” here, a riff from one of Cinderella’s songs in “Into the Woods” there. The one or two things that make you laugh are the result of Zaks’ comic flair. It’s the script’s fault, not his, that actors like Mr. Mann and Lyn Greene (who does a turn as Emma Goldman, if you can believe it) are reduced to playing cartoon foreigners, open-mouthed and slow of speech. Poor Mr. Garber—stuck with playing Booth, who speaks almost entirely in clichés—acquits himself with characteristic dignity. Mr. Hadary, as Guiteau, has a refreshingly antic zeal, and Lee Wilkof, playing Samuel Byck, who wanted to assassinate Nixon by crashing a plane into the White House and got as far as hijacking the plane, is briefly funny dictating messages to Leonard Bernstein. But there’s nothing Zaks (or anyone else) can do to offset either the show’s essential banality or the sententiousness of its style.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 11, 1991