Give some hail to these chiefs: ‘Assassins’ at Theo
Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Assassins, for those who know it, might seem a deliciously fun one to see in mixed company. Being a revue starring nine people from the national rogue’s gallery who sought to assassinate the President of the United States, the cognoscenti can surely clock the lines when the hush descends over the house. When the room gets just that much more still. When hammer meets primer and bona fide laughs break out.
This is not entirely a good thing, for Assassins seeks to afflict the comforted and comfort the…actually, it ought to comfort no one.
Yet across from me at Theo, at least one person was mouthing along with “The Gun Song”, a barbershop quartet on just how empowering that little doohickey can be in the right (read: wrong) hands.
Perhaps the patron was simply basking in the moment, rejoicing the beginning of Theo’s all-Sondheim season. But he was certainly comfortable, even as characters took dead aim at the audience.
This has always been a rageful musical, an examination of the fever at the heart of the American ideal. That is, if you want it, take it, and if you can’t take it, give them hell, no matter whether “they” have any practical hand in what you seek. But Assassins has historically played it cool, reminiscent of, say, The Twilight Zone. (Its climactic scene is effectively straight out of Serling or Charles Beaumont.)
It would seem that, in 2023, we could perhaps use a new tack to drive home the point. And so director Daryl D. Brooks has brought to Theo an Assassins of dripping sweat, bulging veins, and flying spit. Everyone up there is mad as hell.
Neala Barron, one of our foremost young Sondheim interpreters, assays John Wilkes Booth, that most infamous actor, with a particular fire in her gut. Booth, to my knowledge, has never been cross-cast, gender-wise, for even in its flights of fantasy, Assassins scrupulously adheres to historical fact. But—call it giddiness that the notion is paying off or Booth’s bourbon-soaked pride bleeding through—Barron, as grey as a Daguerreotype, is the type of monster that only the stage can summon.
Another first, at least for me: Patrick O’Keefe’s Balladeer, nominally a tonic for the assassins’ bile, is smarmily poisonous, a glassy-eyed patriot and a patronizer. Meanwhile, Liz Bollar’s Proprietor, the Balladeer’s nemesis, gives them all the soft sell even as she’s got them in a vice, just like a proper carnival hack.
This Assassins seems to preach loudest against falling in with anyone who seems just a little too sure of where things stand. Surprisingly, even Booth isn’t that sure that what he did would accomplish anything, never mind avenge the Confederacy, and he spends the evening beseeching others to make sense of what he started. Jump forward one hundred years, and you have Sam Byck (John Parker Jackson, scarily real as a self-described straight-shooter type) monologuing with deathly certainty that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but dropping a 747 on Nixon’s White House will answer at least one question.
There’s an outgrowth of the American experiment that’s gotten much too bold for comfort.
Speaking for myself, I haven’t stopped picking at the scab where Theo’s production grazed me.
Assassins runs through Dec. 17 at 721 Howard Street, Evanston, IL 60202. For tickets or more information, please call (773) 939-4101 or visit theo-u.com.
For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.