Do you know how many American Presidents were assassinated and can you name their assassins? An original way of finding out would be to see Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical.
“You want to shoot a president? Come on shoot a president… Everybody’s got a right to be happy. Everybody’s got a right to be different. Everybody’s got a right to their dreams…”
The musical parodies a number of genres and John Weidman’s book takes an ironic attitude towards the killers. Aaron Tvett’s John Wilkes Booth, the actor who killed Abraham Lincoln, is very stylish. Andy Nyman, who plays the crazy Charles Guiteau, who killed William McKinley in 1901 (because he wouldn’t let him be ambassador to Belgium), is in the brash vaudeville tradition. Meanwhile, Catherine Tate and Melle Stewart have a lot of vulgar fun as two silly girls, who, having failed to kill Gerald Ford, throw their bullets after him. The most dramatic scene is when all the assassins gang up and urge Lee Harvey Oswald (Jamie Parker) to kill John F Kennedy.
Assassins is strictly for sophisticated audiences who are prepared to listen; and as always, with Sondheim, when you come out of the theatre, you immediately want to read his witty and mordant lyrics; and even more so since they are not always audible in Lloyd’s traverse staging.