![]() They are largely two-dimensional buffoons: they forget to load their gun their stomach is upset they want more people to buy their book. In Sondheim and Weidman's hands, the assassins are (forgive me) easy targets. Here at Lyric Stage, director Courtney O'Connor leads an energetic production that keeps the laughs coming–up to the moment a gun goes off. Hinckley and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (who tried, and failed, to kill Gerald Ford) duet on a seventies soft-rock ballad, "Unworthy of Your Love," in which they pledge their respective devotion to Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. Anarchist Leon Czolgosz's assassination of William McKinley, for example, is set to a cheery hoedown. ![]() Sondheim's score is deceptively simple on its surface, a pastiche of patriotic songs that turns the wide-open optimism of Americana on its head. Weidman structures his play like a vaudeville show, with each assassin taking their turn to perform an act or a Sondheim speciality as part of a demented revue. But this strange little show, like most of Sondheim's, has endured over the past three decades. Political assassination was certainly an unusual theme for a musical, even for composer Stephen Sondheim, who'd previously chronicled the death of the American dream in shows from Follies to Merrily We Roll Along. He is our master of ceremonies, inviting us to enter the clown show of presidential killers and wannabes that make up Assassins, the provocative musical written by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and John Weidman (book).Īssassins was first staged Off-Broadway in 1990, just nine years after Ronald Reagan survived a gunshot wound from John Hinckley Jr. "Even though at times they go to extremes." ![]() "Everybody's got the right to be different," the Proprietor (Jackson Jirard) sings as he welcomes us to a circus unlike any other. ![]()
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