Revivals and adaptations are proving startlingly relevant on and Off-Broadway, including Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins, which remains shockingly fresh. This bizarre cult item has become even more dangerously accurate in its view of the dark side of the American dream.
When it premiered Off-Broadway in 1990 and was revived by Roundabout on Broadway in 2004, its collection of desperate loners and oddballs who attempted or succeeded in killing the chief executive were a scary fringe element. Now in 2021, thanks to a certain ex-president, their rage and alienation have become a movement which has kidnapped one of the two major parties and threatens to destroy our democracy.
In director-designer John Doyle’s arresting and intimate staging at Classic Stage Company, the connections from John Wilkes Booth’s eruption of bigoted violence to the Trump-ist insurrection of last year are made shockingly clear. The two monologues from Samuel Byk who schemed to crash into an airplane into Richard Nixon’s White House sound like MAGA outbursts.
Weidman’s revue-like book and Sondheim’s pastiche score get brilliant interpretations from a cast of Broadway and Off-Broadway vets and orchestrator and music director Greg Jarrett. Will Swenson’s manic Charles Guiteau, Judy Kuhn’s off-kilter Sara Jane Moore, Steven Pasquale’s snide Booth, and Andy Grotelueschen’s self-pitying Byck are particularly haunting and scary. Adam Chanler-Berat is a devastating John Hinckley. Ethan Slater as the Balladeer, Eddie Cooper as the Proprietor, and Bianca Horn as Emma Goldman slyly act as hosts in this bizarre house of political horrors.
Doyle’s design transforms the small CSC space into a star-spangled carnival, an ironic setting for a scathing satire which has become a more realistic portrait of our traumatized country.
