We would have loved to attend the literally hundreds of Fringe Festival plays and one-person shows, both serious and comic, in venues all over Edinburgh, but time and energy prevented that. However, we luckily came across an extra-added performance at 11:30 in the morning of this Stephen Sondheim musical we had never seen. Midatlantic Productions is an engaging young group of actors from in and around Cambridge University, England, who gave an exemplary and even endearing performance of this arresting musical that -- and I quote from the excellent program notes -- "educates, agitates and entertains," as it provocatively tells the stories of nine would-be and successful presidential assassins.
This was no ordinary cast. Matthew Wilkinson, the co-director, who plays Charles Guiteau, and with whom we had the pleasure of chatting before the show, took his undergraduate studies at Cambridge in zoology and is now studying there for a Doctorate in Pterodactyls. Michael Bahar, his co-director, who portrays John Wilkes Booth, will begin studying Law at Boston University this year. Both men did an exceptional job directing, acting, and staging on an interesting set, designed by Liz King.
Sondheim's brilliance shines through in this work of history, whose subject matter is at once fascinating and very sad. The piece about President Kennedy's death is the most difficult because it is the most recent and one through which we have lived. It is all the more poignant, for the photo of John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin is included in the montage shown on the screen, painfully reminding us of the former's recent death. As music director Simon Gray aptly points out, the score is a splendid panorama of more than a century of American popular music, in which Sondheim matches the chronology of the action with musical styles from turn-of-the-century gospel hymn to 70's rock ballad.
The band, by the way, features eight very skilled musicians, whose accompaniment supports the air of professionalism of the entire production. In many ways, this performance, held in the basement of St. Augustine's Church, proved one of my favorites of the Fest.
