As the political center of the nation, D.C. is a grand stage for theater of the largest scale. Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, Mask and Bauble’s spring musical, lays bare the fact that politics is, at root, little more than theater. Just as every hero has his villain, politicians have their assassins. Assassins tells the stories of the men and women who have killed, or attempted to kill, our beloved leaders.
Directed by Mike Kocher (CAS ‘05), Assassins is equal parts historical pastiche and ironic comedy. A compilation of the stories of the murders and attempted assassinations of recent and historical presidents, the musical ties together a series of scenes depicting historically separate occurrences with wit and irony. The characters are so real that an explanatory display awaits the audience in the foyer, anticipating the inevitable questions that will accompany a play so heavy with history.
The musical deals with the elusiveness of the American dream and the anger and resentment boiling just below its thin skin. While presidents rotate through the White House, the frustration embodied in Assassins’ characters remains from Lincoln to Reagan straight through to today. It becomes easy, throughout the musical, to forget that there was someone on the other end of the guns that the characters toss around.
Vaudeville provides the backing theme for Kocher’s craftily-handled interpretation of the musical. Underscoring the theater-politics parallel already written into the script, the theme provides cohesion for the stories that interact in a manner in which their historical counterparts never did. The “Balladeer,” played by Mat Acocella (CAS ‘06), sings the ballads of each successful assassin. As he croons the wittily presented stories of the assassins, he connects them through time.
It is the casting of Assassins that ensures its success. Acocella, whose voice is among the strongest in the cast, is unobtrusive and calming. Francisco Crespo (SFS ‘08), who portrays with startling credibility the manic-depressive Samuel Byck, outlines his complaints against Nixon with shaking hands. Fixing on the lies that pervade American life, he tells the audience that his solution is to attempt to pilot a 747 into the White House. And somehow the audience buys it.
John Wilkes Booth, played by Michael Joelson (CAS ‘08), charges Lincoln with “taking the U out of the U.S. of A.” Like all the assassins, he simultaneously arouses sympathy and revulsion. Joelson never allows Booth to tread too deeply into the realm of reason before exploding with the violence that led him to kill Lincoln in the first place.
A few screws rattled around the minds of each of the assassins portrayed in the musical. Still, many are granted acerbic insight. The stark comparison between the disillusioned Polish-American worker Leon Czolgosz, played by Mat MacNelly (CAS ‘08), who assassinated President McKinley in the name of social justice, and dilettante Charles Guiteau, played by Seamus Sullivan (SFS ‘08), who assassinated President Garfield in an attempt at fame, the musical shows that even in the history of presidential assassinations, it takes all kinds.
One of the play’s funniest scenes imagines the meeting of a hippie and Charles Manson’s girlfriend to plot the death of Gerald Ford. The women, played by Lynsey Weston (CAS ‘08) and Anne Popolizio (CAS ‘05), wield guns like tubes of lipstick. With the comic touch of a walk-on appearance by a Georgetown Jesuit in the role of Gerald Ford, the actresses capture the absurdity of their characters’ plans.
No detail was left untended in the set of Assassins, designed by Candice Mizushima (MSB ‘07). Wherever a prop could be placed to emphasize the reality of the scenes, it was. The costumes, designed by Courtney Barker (SFS ‘05), are similarly thorough, showing historical accuracy.
The mantra “everybody’s got the right to be happy” is imbued with a slightly different flavor when trilled by the gun-toting assassins of much-loved presidents. The musical labors to show viewers that even the assassins acted under some semblance of reason, warped as it may have been. How much value to assign to their words is up to the viewer, but the musical grants them a stage.
