Assassins, Everyman Theatre, Belconnen Theatre

Stephen Sondheim's 1990 musical is one of the special ones for me - I encountered it, age 16, when the cast recording was played in full on ABC Classic FM in their Sunday musical theatre slot. And it's a powerful show, with moments that shocked and astounded 16-year-old-me, that a musical could go this far  - dealing with big questions about American identity through the prism of 9 people who all attempted to kill a sitting US president (four successfully). Through a combination of Sondheim's score (genre hopping from Sousa-ish patriotic marches to seventies light-FM romantic ballads to a grand cakewalk) and John Weidman's script which mixes and matches the nine across time and space to confront each other with the questions of why they felt drawn to murder, and what the underside of the American Dream really is.

The show does have its revue-ish tendencies, and there's a certain structural repetitiveness as each of the Assassins are introduced and have their story told, drawing us into sympathy with them before throwing us back out again as we see the consequences and ugly sides of their actions. But Kelly Roberts and Grant Pegg's production keeps it moving along, played almost as a small local carnival of the angry disenfranchised. On Christopher Zuber's set of a lawn, a covered wagon,  a couple of boxes and a faded American Flag, we get an up close and personal view of these historic malcontents.

All 9 performers knock their sections of the show out of the park. Jarrad West as John Wilkes Booth combines self-important actorish pomposity with terrifying rage when he unleashes it ("The Ballad of Booth" is one of my favourite songs of the score, and the way it moves from drawing you in with Booth's southern lost-cause sentimentality before reminding you what dark roots that lost-cause had). Isaac Gordon's Leon Czolgosz has a sweet, yearning quality combined with anger at his losses (and his sweet voice at the top of "Gun Song", another of my favourites, drew me in). Jonathan Rush's demented Charles Guiteau, vain, deluded and ultimately lost in his own ego as he bellows "I will be remembered!" (ultimately, of course, Guiteau is an obscure murderer of an obscure president, making the moment all the more pathetic). Belle Nicol's smugly enlightened Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme, who repeats everything Charles Manson's taught her with absolute assurance is engrossing and powerful. Pippin Carroll's Balladeer has the challenge of bringing back perspective to what these people really are, and the implications of what they have done, and he sells his songs with compassion and clarity. Tracy Noble's Sara Jane Moore is a nutty delight, bewhildered, disorganised and easily drawn into the idea of murder as a possible release for her confusion. Jim Adamik's Samuel Byck is largely communicated in two monologues, full of bitterness and rage but trying desperately to communicate outside his own circle. Joel Hutchings' Guisseppe Zangara maybe gets the least exposure of the nine (his one big song is largely a song about the bystanders to his attempted assassination) but his powerful voice and evident pain remains impactful. And Will Collett's John Hinkley Jr is an all too familiar figure of a young man who doesn't recognise how ludicrously out of place his desires are.

This was a bucket-list show for me that I desperately wanted to see, and it paid off everything I ever hoped it could be. There are moments, particularly in the climax of this show, that I desperately want to write about but won't because they spoiler moments of the extraordinary that need to be discovered in the moment - but this is powerful, urgent, engrossing work that tore into me in the best possible way. Most impressive. Tickets at https://www.canberraticketing.com.au/show/assassins/

The Woman in the Window, Canberra Rep

A look at art, freedom, loyalties and supression, "The Woman in the Window" plays in two timeframes, Leningrad in the 1950s and Australia in a distant future. The first looking at the historical Anna Akhmatova and the period when she was kept virtual prisoner by the Stalinist regime, forbidden legally to write anything but translations of other people's poems, and required to show herself at her window twice a day, her life with her supportive friend Lili, her neighbour Tusya, and the police, Stetsky and Korzh. In the future, we follow Rachel Sekerov, a young "conference stress consultant" (which in reality appears to be a government-approved prostitute) assigned to a poet from a rich family who struggles with her own kind of freedom.

The two halves sometimes make strange bedfellows - the thematic links are apparent but it's not until the second act that they start to feel like they actually belong together and are informing each other. For the first half, we get the viscerally staged scenes of Akhmatova and her life, passionate and engaging, cut across with Rachel's story, which is (deliberately) somewhat more sterile in design. The Akhmatova scenes are anchored by two glorious performances from Karen Vickery (as Anna) and Lainie Hart (as Lili), who sell a relationship driven by survival and passion for art and admiration for each others work, even in the dire circumstances they're currently in - both are given room to breathe and to build a real, three dimensional friendship between old colleagues. Vickery also has most of the best jokes in the play (in particular one line demolishing Chekov - I'm starting to think a one-woman show of "Karen Vickery Plays Authors who Hate Other Authors" would be my dream night in the theatre). In a more minor role, Michael Sparks makes his authority clear as the key interrogator Stetsky. 

It's in the future sections where the play struggles a little - Rachel, perhaps inevitably, comes across a little more shallowly than Akhmatova, and it's not until the second half that she really starts to engage in the themes of the play more deeply. I think there's a little more space than this production presents for these sections to have a bit more passion and engagement (and the moments where that does sneak through - a VR encounter with a tartigrade, and towards the end, are the ones that work best) - and while I understand the desire for contrast between the two sections, the future sections feel a little bit flat. Zoe Swan as Rachel and Alex McPherson in two roles as the stern Miz and the emotional Maren drive a lot of the energy of these scenes where it comes - Michael Cooper's poet Sandor isn't ever quite as deeply drawn as the plot seems to require him to be, and Marli Haddell's Auditor is more an abstract menace figure than anything permanent.

Liz Bradley's direction mostly serves the period sections rather than the future sections well - while the scenes flow together reasonably, it tends to feel a little bit sterile (this may be partially a function of most scenes playing without any accompanying music or soundscape - it does feel like it needs something to give it just a little more drive). Michael Spark's set is functional without really finding a good visual metaphor that might tie the action together. and Anna Senior's costumes are, again, appropriate without really ever standing out into anything surprising or eye-catching.

This is an interesting attempt at a challenging work, but it, for me, doesn't quite engage me as much as I hoped it would - it's liberated largely by the performances of Vickery and Hart, which is where it feels most human. 

Shakespeare in Love, Melbourne Theatre Company, Canberra Theatre

This is a case of a production that is gorgeous (Gabriela Tyeslova), staged fairly well (Simon Phillips direction flows the scenes together tightly and ensures everything moves well) and has a lot of witty dialogue and a rich and strong supporting cast (Deirdre Rubenstein, as is appropriate, steals every scene as Queen Elizabeth I but there's also good work from Tony Taylor, Aljin Ajella and Francis Greenslade). So why did I leave just a little dissatisfied?

I think it's that I just didn't quite buy the love story that's meant to be at the centre. Michael Wahr as Shakespeare and Clair Van Der Boom as Viola should spark off each other and ... here, it never quite takes hold and captures me up in the grand romance of it all. They go through the motions effectively but ... the spark just doesn't land. Which is a pity. This is a clever production that, while it has all the familiar highlights from the movie, doesn't feel slavishly tied to its image or its performances - all the performances feel like they've been developed organically - it's just that, at the centre, this doesn't quite go from "very pretty" to heartfelt and lifechanging. Which, well, is how I like my theatre.