THEATER

'Assassins' takes a dark look at attackers

By Randy Harriman
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, April 10, 2008

'Everybody's got the right to be happy. Everybody's got the right to their dreams." So sing the characters in Steven Sondheim's musical play "Assassins," which opens Friday night at the University of Texas' B. Iden Payne Theatre in a production by the university's Department of Theatre and Dance.

To what lengths may one go to achieve that happiness, those dreams? Kill the president of the United States? The answer to that is, of course, no. But what makes some people think that assassinating a president is the answer to their problems?

That's the question explored in Sondheim's work, which examines the lives and motivations of nine of the people who have murdered, or attempted to murder, U.S. presidents.

Altogether, there have been at least 17, perhaps even 19, attempts to kill a president; four have been successful. We're familiar with the names of some of the attackers — two who were successful and one who made an attempt — and the names of their victims: John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865; Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy in 1963; John Hinckley Jr. shot and wounded Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Others are less remembered: Charles Guiteau killed James Garfield in 1881; Leon Czolgosz murdered William McKinley in 1901; Giuseppe Zangara tried to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt in 1933; Samuel Byck attempted to hijack a Boeing 747 and fly it into the White House in 1974 to wipe out Richard Nixon; Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore shot at Gerald Ford in 1975.

The nine people we meet in "Assassins," all of whom clung (some still cling) to sanity with varying degrees of success, had problems they were trying to fix. In Sondheim's treatment, they somehow coexist in a time warp, situated in what appears to be a carnival shooting gallery, giving advice to one another, teaching others how to shoot a gun and encouraging newcomers to see assassination as a solution.

In effect, "Assassins" is a series of psychological profiles laced with catchy tunes, brilliant lyrics (many based on the actual words of the perpetrators) and the darkest humor. The show has been accused of promoting violence as a solution, but that's like saying that diagnosing an illness promotes death.

This production of Sondheim's show is presented as a part of the UT College of Fine Arts' two-year Musical Theatre Pilot Project. Directed by Rod Caspers, with musical direction by Lyn Koenning, the creative team includes students from many different UT colleges and disciplines.

A university production of "Assassins" is curiously appropriate, for when the show first opened off-Broadway in January 1991, it was not well received, partly because of the sensitive nature of its content juxtaposed against the Gulf War, which had just entered its most combative phase. As a result, the show never moved to Broadway, and for the next several years, it was performed largely by regional and college theater companies and even found the spotlight on a few brave high school stages.

There was an attempt to revive "Assassins" for Broadway in 2001, with rehearsals scheduled to begin the third week of September. The events of Sept. 11 wiped out that plan, and so the show went back under wraps, awaiting the right opportunity to reopen.

That opportunity finally came in 2004, and after some renewed scrambling for financial support, "Assassins" opened April 22 at Studio 54 to public and critical acclaim, subsequently winning five Tony awards, including Best Musical Revival.

The local production is something of a combination of the two professional incarnations of the piece, using the earlier off-Broadway version's small orchestration but incorporating the song "Something Just Broke," which was not a part of the original.

After "Assassins," students in the pilot project will continue with coursework and performance opportunities. In the summer of 2009, they will participate in a concentrated, intensive workshop in which they will collaborate with musical theater professionals in the top-to-bottom creation of a new work to be presented at the end of the semester.