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/
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