Musicals! Assassins
Unfortunately, my brain, as is its wont, has been taken over by musicals while I'm trying to dissertate. I've always been a big fan of musicals. In fact, I spent much of my rather odd youth hanging out with a troupe of friends where we wrote and performed musicals for fun. Musicals were the spark that kicked off my relationship with my best friend, who is now a musical theater writer in New York.
So I love musicals. And my brain has been taken over by one. I'm going to talk about it eventually, but first, just to get my brain off the topic, I'll talk about my three favorite musicals and why I like them.
Assassins, by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, is a truly unfortunate show. By that I mean that it has had some really bad strokes of luck, and that's why it's not so well known. But I think it's one of Sondheim's best works, up there with Sweeney Todd and the first act of Sunday In The Park With George. It's dark, it's disturbing, it's viciously funny, and you will leave the theater feeling mightily entertained and even more mightily unsettled. Assassins is a sketch show about the men and women who have tried to, and often succeeded in, assassinating the President of the United States. Cheerful!
It's tricky subject matter at the best of times, and Sondheim and Weidman's timing could not have been worse. The show debuted in 1991, just as the Cold War was won, tensions in the Gulf were ratcheting up, and American patriotism was just beginning its climb to its current jingoistic peaks. No one wanted to see a show about presidential assassins then. Assassins languished Off-Broadway for a while, then made its way into the college-theater circuit, for which it is admirably well suited. The next attempt at a Broadway revival came years later . . . scheduled for September of 2001. Yeah, as you can probably guess, that went over like a lead balloon, and I believe that that revival was ultimately canceled. It's since got some Broadway play, I believe, but it's never going to be anyone's definition of a feel-good hit.
But if you can read it, or see a performance, you won't regret it. This is a show that doesn't exactly have a plot, but it makes up for that with some of the most interesting characters you will ever see singing about their desires. For, in the end, that's what Assassins is really about. Desire. Every single character in the show wants something. They want it so badly that it hurts -- in at least one case physically -- and the one thing they know is that they will never, ever, ever be able to have what they want. Something -- society, history, their own incompetence -- stands in their way, and they cannot ever hope to achieve their desire. And they all live in the United States of America, a land that has told them, over and over, that dreams can come true. These characters know that that's a lie, and they are bitter. In their pain and bitterness, they lash out.
Make no mistake, these are not nice people. I mean, you think of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, and the first word that springs to your mind is probably not "woobie," right? Confederate sympathizer, first successful presidential assassin, Booth is one of the ultimate American villains. Can you find it in your heart to sympathize with him?
Probably not. But Sondheim and Weidman challenge you to try. They'll make it a bit easier for you. There's a character called the Balladeer, who's this sort of Pete Seeger/Woody Guthrie folk singer, who introduces you to and mediates your encounters with some of the Assassins. In the "Ballad of Booth," he introduces you to Booth, and asks for you the questions that you want to ask, but can't quite:
Why did you do it, Johnny?
Nobody agrees.
You who had everything,
What made you bring
A nation to its knees?
The Balladeer also functions as the moral center of the show. Assassins goes deep into some really dark places, but it remains firmly on the side of "explanation is not excuse." The Balladeer really does want to know why Booth shot Lincoln, and he's not only willing to hear Booth's honest answer, but he's also willing to broadcast it to the waiting audience. And it's a hard answer to hear, because Booth is a racist murderer, but you need to hear him say that, because you also need to hear him say, almost literally in the same verse, that he is a committed patriot, grieving for the deaths of six hundred thousand of his countrymen, his nation's crushing defeat, and the deep blow that the Union has taken, a blow that is even now not entirely healed. That the country for which he grieves is the Confederate States of America does not make his grief any less real, or his patriotism any less fervent. The Balladeer lets you see all that, before gently reminding you of what this man did.
But traitors just get jeers and boos,
Not visits to their graves,
While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews,
Because of you, John, now gets only raves.
Damn you, Johnny!
You paved the way
For other madmen
To make us pay.
Lots of madmen
Have had their say --
But only for a day.
Listen to the stories.
Hear it in the songs.
Angry men
Don't write the rules,
And guns don't right the wrongs.
I've talked quite a bit about the "Ballad of Booth" because it really sets the tone for the whole show. If, after that ten-minute scene, you feel that you can trust what Assassins is going to do, you'll enjoy the show. If not, then bail out now.
As I said earlier, there isn't much plot. Assassins is a sketch show, in which all the Assassins have their moment to shine, to explain themselves, sometimes to show you their crime, sometimes to show you the aftermath. They occasionally interact in the show's nowhere space, joking and criticizing each other and commiserating. The song that everyone remembers, "Unworthy Of Your Love", takes place in this space. People love to reinterpret it as a straightforward love duet. As such, it's pretty, but not all that great. But when you put it in context, with John Hinckley (who shot Ronald Reagan) and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (who shot at Gerald Ford) singing to the unobtainable objects of their affection (Jody Foster and Charles Manson, respectively) about what they would do for love, it becomes deliciously dark and creepy.
Sondheim and Weidman are both gentlemen of a certain age, so it's not unexpected that Assassins climaxes with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. What's interesting is that Oswald himself isn't very important. The legend of the Kennedy assassination is so enormous that Oswald can't carry it on his own. Instead, Sondheim and Weidman use the ten minutes before Oswald fires his famous shot to meditate on the nature of love, fame, and history. The conversation between Booth and Oswald, as Booth appears in the Texas School Book Depository to convince Oswald that there is another answer to his problems apart from suicide, is theatrical brilliance. In it, Booth encapsulates the ultimate reason that any of the Assassins did what they did. They couldn't have whatever they wanted, so they took the next best thing, and they did it with all the passion they'd been denied. If they couldn't have life, they'd make sure someone else couldn't have it, either. If they couldn't be loved, they could be hated. If they couldn't be famous, they could be infamous.
Oswald needs some convincing, and Booth is very convincing.
OSWALD: I'm not a murderer.
BOOTH: Who said you were?
OSWALD: You just said I should kill the President.
BOOTH: Lee, when you kill a President, it isn't murder. Murder is a tawdry little crime; it's born of greed, or lust, or liquor. Adulterers and shopkeepers get murdered. But when a President gets killed, when Julius Caesar got killed . . . he was assassinated. And the man who did it . . .
OSWALD: Brutus.
BOOTH: Ah! You know his name. Brutus assassinated Caesar, what?, two thousand years ago, and here's a high school drop-out with a dollar twenty-five an hour job in Dallas, Texas who knows who he was. And they say fame is fleeting.
The Assassins committed terrible crimes. But. Booth's speech. He's right. Everything he says here is true. He's right. And he's utterly wrong. And that is the paradox at the heart of Assassins, the reward you get for listening to murderers justify themselves. You get to look at that paradox and examine it in all its dark, desperate, wanting, human glory.
And that is what I love about Assassins.
So I love musicals. And my brain has been taken over by one. I'm going to talk about it eventually, but first, just to get my brain off the topic, I'll talk about my three favorite musicals and why I like them.
Assassins, by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, is a truly unfortunate show. By that I mean that it has had some really bad strokes of luck, and that's why it's not so well known. But I think it's one of Sondheim's best works, up there with Sweeney Todd and the first act of Sunday In The Park With George. It's dark, it's disturbing, it's viciously funny, and you will leave the theater feeling mightily entertained and even more mightily unsettled. Assassins is a sketch show about the men and women who have tried to, and often succeeded in, assassinating the President of the United States. Cheerful!
It's tricky subject matter at the best of times, and Sondheim and Weidman's timing could not have been worse. The show debuted in 1991, just as the Cold War was won, tensions in the Gulf were ratcheting up, and American patriotism was just beginning its climb to its current jingoistic peaks. No one wanted to see a show about presidential assassins then. Assassins languished Off-Broadway for a while, then made its way into the college-theater circuit, for which it is admirably well suited. The next attempt at a Broadway revival came years later . . . scheduled for September of 2001. Yeah, as you can probably guess, that went over like a lead balloon, and I believe that that revival was ultimately canceled. It's since got some Broadway play, I believe, but it's never going to be anyone's definition of a feel-good hit.
But if you can read it, or see a performance, you won't regret it. This is a show that doesn't exactly have a plot, but it makes up for that with some of the most interesting characters you will ever see singing about their desires. For, in the end, that's what Assassins is really about. Desire. Every single character in the show wants something. They want it so badly that it hurts -- in at least one case physically -- and the one thing they know is that they will never, ever, ever be able to have what they want. Something -- society, history, their own incompetence -- stands in their way, and they cannot ever hope to achieve their desire. And they all live in the United States of America, a land that has told them, over and over, that dreams can come true. These characters know that that's a lie, and they are bitter. In their pain and bitterness, they lash out.
Make no mistake, these are not nice people. I mean, you think of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, and the first word that springs to your mind is probably not "woobie," right? Confederate sympathizer, first successful presidential assassin, Booth is one of the ultimate American villains. Can you find it in your heart to sympathize with him?
Probably not. But Sondheim and Weidman challenge you to try. They'll make it a bit easier for you. There's a character called the Balladeer, who's this sort of Pete Seeger/Woody Guthrie folk singer, who introduces you to and mediates your encounters with some of the Assassins. In the "Ballad of Booth," he introduces you to Booth, and asks for you the questions that you want to ask, but can't quite:
Why did you do it, Johnny?
Nobody agrees.
You who had everything,
What made you bring
A nation to its knees?
The Balladeer also functions as the moral center of the show. Assassins goes deep into some really dark places, but it remains firmly on the side of "explanation is not excuse." The Balladeer really does want to know why Booth shot Lincoln, and he's not only willing to hear Booth's honest answer, but he's also willing to broadcast it to the waiting audience. And it's a hard answer to hear, because Booth is a racist murderer, but you need to hear him say that, because you also need to hear him say, almost literally in the same verse, that he is a committed patriot, grieving for the deaths of six hundred thousand of his countrymen, his nation's crushing defeat, and the deep blow that the Union has taken, a blow that is even now not entirely healed. That the country for which he grieves is the Confederate States of America does not make his grief any less real, or his patriotism any less fervent. The Balladeer lets you see all that, before gently reminding you of what this man did.
But traitors just get jeers and boos,
Not visits to their graves,
While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews,
Because of you, John, now gets only raves.
Damn you, Johnny!
You paved the way
For other madmen
To make us pay.
Lots of madmen
Have had their say --
But only for a day.
Listen to the stories.
Hear it in the songs.
Angry men
Don't write the rules,
And guns don't right the wrongs.
I've talked quite a bit about the "Ballad of Booth" because it really sets the tone for the whole show. If, after that ten-minute scene, you feel that you can trust what Assassins is going to do, you'll enjoy the show. If not, then bail out now.
As I said earlier, there isn't much plot. Assassins is a sketch show, in which all the Assassins have their moment to shine, to explain themselves, sometimes to show you their crime, sometimes to show you the aftermath. They occasionally interact in the show's nowhere space, joking and criticizing each other and commiserating. The song that everyone remembers, "Unworthy Of Your Love", takes place in this space. People love to reinterpret it as a straightforward love duet. As such, it's pretty, but not all that great. But when you put it in context, with John Hinckley (who shot Ronald Reagan) and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (who shot at Gerald Ford) singing to the unobtainable objects of their affection (Jody Foster and Charles Manson, respectively) about what they would do for love, it becomes deliciously dark and creepy.
Sondheim and Weidman are both gentlemen of a certain age, so it's not unexpected that Assassins climaxes with Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. What's interesting is that Oswald himself isn't very important. The legend of the Kennedy assassination is so enormous that Oswald can't carry it on his own. Instead, Sondheim and Weidman use the ten minutes before Oswald fires his famous shot to meditate on the nature of love, fame, and history. The conversation between Booth and Oswald, as Booth appears in the Texas School Book Depository to convince Oswald that there is another answer to his problems apart from suicide, is theatrical brilliance. In it, Booth encapsulates the ultimate reason that any of the Assassins did what they did. They couldn't have whatever they wanted, so they took the next best thing, and they did it with all the passion they'd been denied. If they couldn't have life, they'd make sure someone else couldn't have it, either. If they couldn't be loved, they could be hated. If they couldn't be famous, they could be infamous.
Oswald needs some convincing, and Booth is very convincing.
OSWALD: I'm not a murderer.
BOOTH: Who said you were?
OSWALD: You just said I should kill the President.
BOOTH: Lee, when you kill a President, it isn't murder. Murder is a tawdry little crime; it's born of greed, or lust, or liquor. Adulterers and shopkeepers get murdered. But when a President gets killed, when Julius Caesar got killed . . . he was assassinated. And the man who did it . . .
OSWALD: Brutus.
BOOTH: Ah! You know his name. Brutus assassinated Caesar, what?, two thousand years ago, and here's a high school drop-out with a dollar twenty-five an hour job in Dallas, Texas who knows who he was. And they say fame is fleeting.
The Assassins committed terrible crimes. But. Booth's speech. He's right. Everything he says here is true. He's right. And he's utterly wrong. And that is the paradox at the heart of Assassins, the reward you get for listening to murderers justify themselves. You get to look at that paradox and examine it in all its dark, desperate, wanting, human glory.
And that is what I love about Assassins.