Assassins by Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman

Poster

Assassins is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by John Weidman, based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr. It uses the premise of a murderous carnival game to produce a revue-style portrayal of men and women who attempted to assassinate Presidents of the United States.

The music varies to reflect the popular music of the eras depicted.

SAMUEL BYCK (1930-74)

He was an unemployed, divorced salesman who picketed the White House in a Santa Claus suit and sent tapes to celebrities outlining his plan to hijack a plane and crash it into the Richard Nixon's White House. He even sent one to Leonard Bernstein, the busy conductor and composer. "Maybe if you can't listen now," suggests Byck, aware of the pressures on the maestro's time, "you can listen 'Tonight, tonight...' I love that song". His message completed, he leaves singing "Everything's great in America..."

"I will try to get the plane aloft and fly it toward the target area, which will be Washington, D.C. I will shoot the pilot and then in the last few minutes try to steer the plane into the target, which is the White House."

On Feb. 22, 1974, at Baltimore-Washington International Airport he killed a guard, forced his way onto a Delta flight for Atlanta, killed the co-pilot and wounded the pilot. The plane never left the ground and Byck was shot by guards and then killed himself.

From Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping into Freedom by Matt Wolf

Eventually, as has always been true of Donmar musicals, an ensemble was arrived at mixing self described novices like Ciar�n Hinds with veterans of the genre: among them Louise Gold, Michael Cantwell, and Henry Goodman, whose jaunty Charles Guiteau (the Garfield killer, seen in Assassins hightstepping his way to the gallows) later won him as Oliver. "I'd never been in a musical before" says Hinds "and probably never will be again" - even if his part as the would-be Nixon assassin Samuel Byck demanded vocally only that he join in two chorus numbers. Says Hinds "I think they recognized I'm not a singer."

At the same time, Mendes was showing the way in witch an actor's experience of the classics - Hinds had played Achilles in the director's Troilus and Cressida - could serve a musical with a strong text (an idea that subsequently would come to even greater fruition with Adrian Lester in Company). As played by Hinds, Byck seemed a crazed variant of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, the film whose teenage star, Jodie Foster, had in fact prompted an abortive pressidential assassination all its own. "Ciarán had these stonking great monologues, which he did brilliantly", says castmate Louise Gold; so what if singing wasn't his strongest suit?

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 31 October 1992

And, although it's a no-star ensemble piece, one cannot but single out Henry Goodman's fizzingly energetic Guiteau, Ciarán Hinds' morosely self-important Samuel Byck, David Firth's posterity-concious Booth and the weird double-act of Cathryn Bradshaw and Louise Gold as Gerald Ford's purative killers.

From City Limits magazine by Ian Shuttleworth,29 October, 1992

Sondheim is as simply eloquent as ever, and subverting conventions all the way - the main romantic number Unworthy Of Your Love is a duet between "Squeaky" Fromme (also Ford, 1975) and Hinckley (Reagan, 1981) to pictures of their respective idols, Charlie Manson and Jodie Foster; Weidman, too, gets in a metatextual jab, as Byck (an unrecognisable Ciarán Hinds) records a rambling tape to Leonard Bernstein including snatches from Tonight and America, whose lyrics were of course written by Sondheim. The show's specific Americanness never feels alien; no background knowledge is assumed - the feelings are universal. Things grow fuzzy only with a climactic episode in which all eight others try to persuade Lee Harvey Oswald that by shooting JFK he will somehow reinvest the rest of them with meaning as well.

From The Stage, November 12, 1992, by Peter Roberts

...the main thrust of the evening is an attack of the American dream that encourages its citizens to believe in their right to happiness, hence the opening and closing number Every-body's Got the Right.

Sondheim's view is that when happiness does not materialise some citizens feel that they have the right to take it out on their president - so Bush can count himself fortunate to be dismissed at the ballot box and not at the end of a bullet.

The best number in Assassins is in the gallows humour of The Ballad of Guitea sung by the excellent Henry Goodman as the murderer of President Garfield who quite literally performs a song and dance number on the steps of the scaffold with a rope round his neck. If only the entire show has been on that macabre level. Sam Mendes' brisk production corrals the 13 assassins in separate fairground cubicles from which they emerge to set pieces like Samuel Byck, the would-be assassin of Nixon forcefully done by Ciarán Hinds, who tapes long rambling messages to Leonard Bernstein.

At the close of the evening the assassins - in an only half successful surrealistic episode - egg Lee Harvey Oswald on to shoot Kennedy to justify their existence. Despite its rapturous reception here, I thought Assassins something of a work in progress which might more satisfactorily be eventually restyled into a full two act work in which anomalies like the coming and going (for very long sketches) of its showman presenter (Paul Bentley) could be ironed out.

CHARACTER	ACTOR	CHARACTER	ACTOR
Book by John Weidman Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Directed by Sam Mendes Sets and Costumes Designed by Anthony Ward Lighting designed by Paul Payant Musical Director Jeremy Sams
The Proprietor	Paul Bentley	Samuel Byck	Ciarán Hinds
John Hinckley	Michael Cantwell	Charles Guiteau	Henry Goodman
Guiseppe Zangara	Paul Murphy	Lynette Fromme	Cathryn Bradshaw
Sara Jane Moore	Louise Gold	John Wilkes Booth	David Firth
Lee Harvey Oswald	Gareth Snook	and	Anthony Barclay, Kevin Walton, Michelle Fine, Jack Ellis