Assassins

The dark and haunting Stephen Sondheim musical, Assassins, opens the fall season at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Assassins is far from being your average crowd-pleaser, and artistic director Mark Clements is to be commended for mounting this big-budget musical.

Wherever it’s produced, Assassins won’t have audiences cheering for the characters, all of whom are assassins or would-be assassins of American presidents. The musical is set in an abandoned fairground, where a carnival barker entices a ragtag group of misfits to fulfill their dreams by killing a president. As each character tries out the gun handed to him by the carny (Jonathan Gillard Daly), we find out they are John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinkley, Squeaky Fromme, etc. This surreal scene sets the tone for what’s to follow. As the show progresses, various killers reach across historical boundaries so they can appear together.

Many of the actors playing these roles are new to Milwaukee audiences, having been imported from New York and elsewhere in the U.S. Under Mark Clements’ excellent direction, they make this musical everything it could be.

This still doesn’t eliminate the show’s nagging problem. Assassins glorifies the killers by the mere fact of putting a spotlight on them. Sondheim himself has claimed that the show takes aim not at the killers, but at the American way of life – promising dreams that aren’t delivered. But it’s easier for the audience to focus on people, not ideas. The killers’ stories are told in a sequence of vignettes, which often end when someone is shot, hung or electrocuted. The world of Assassins is not a pleasant one, and Sondheim doesn’t shy away from this fact.

In many ways, the most successful part of the show is its beginning. After the carnie sings his introductory song, he brings out the show’s “pioneer,” John Wilkes Booth. The folksy re-telling of Lincoln’s death and Booth’s brief escape rivets the audience’s attention. The story is greatly enhanced by the sudden appearance of a narrator. Skinny and roughly dressed, he appears to have been borrowed out of a Mark Twain novel. The narrator (officially called the “balladeer”) is an appealing character who takes the audience on a chronological tour of American song, from gospel and country to tunes of the present day). No wonder that top-notch talent such as Patrick Cassidy and Neil Patrick Harris have played this part on New York stages. Here, Chris Peluso demonstrates a gorgeous voice and the narrator’s necessarily likeable demeanor.