THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Thirteen people have attempted to assassinate the President of the United States. Four of them succeeded and killed Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and JFK. In each case the attacker’s weapon was a firearm, epitomizing, perhaps, the gun’s totemic place in American society and culture. From this rather forbidding material Sondheim (at a curious turn in his career away from Broadway bluster) and John Weidman fashioned a great musical comedy, a sort of chamber piece which unites 9 of those assassins on one stage to tell their story. It’s rather like what Caryl Churchill did with her dinner party of great women from history in Top Girls.
It’s a great theatrical conceit and in this sparklingly urgent revival director Polly Findlay and designer Lizzie Clachan immerse us immediately in the carnival atmosphere of a typical US Party Convention. There’s the blue apron stage festooned with bunting, and upbeat country music rousing the faithful, with a band wearing MAGA-type caps sitting along the front. It’s a good move, as is including the ever present, overly-coiffed 24 hour news channel anchors.
Two large TV screens relay the often-complex shootings as they play out, just as if Fox News were covering them live. At the finale the characters briefly end up in a trashed Oval Office, a clever but not forced allusion to January 6th horrors, typifying this great piece and how it can accommodate clever updating.
The large cast, which includes the 9 killers and 3 balladeers who narrate, give some top West End talent the chance to shine. The standout is Amy Booth-Steel as Sarah Jane Moore who together (but in reality in separate incidents) with the curiously puritanical Charlie Manson groupie, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, made a hilariously bungled attempt to down President Ford. Booth-Steel is gloriously witty as the harassed suburban housewife (she can’t get childcare so takes both her dog and her kid to her shooting!) but she never patronizes this great character. Carly Mercedes Dyer (who stole Anything Goes last year) as Fromme matches her wit and keen intelligence and not surprisingly is the vocal standout in a great ensemble company.
Her duet with John Hinckley Jr. (who shot President Reagan and is played by Jack Shalloo) ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ is a musical highlight and it could have been written by The Carpenters or John Denver. That was Sondheim’s great gift, he could craft a perfect song in any style and not make it a mere pastiche.
The delightfully varied musical styles, elevated here by Michael Starobin’s rich orchestrations, encompass everything from country to folk to AOR and even a great Ragtime number ‘The Balled of Guiteau’ sung by Harry Hepple as he climbs the steps to his gallows. Hepple’s gloriously camp take on Charles Guiteau, the shameless narcissist and social climber who shot President Garfield, is a joy. He shot him because he wanted to be Ambassador to France.
Weidman’s book is a wonder in that with great economy it relates the very contrasting tales of the 9. They all had their reasons; some were rightfully aggrieved but some just plain nuts. No grand conclusions are drawn, nor should they be, but what unites them is the craven desire just to be noticed.
TV turned stage star Danny Mac displays a great new vocal confidence as John Wilkes Booth who in a wonderful scene, which pulls the various threads together, convinces the sad, ineffectual Lee Harvey Oswald that killing himself would be pointless when he could kill a President and achieve immortality. In a society drunk on celebrity (and we’re no different) who could contradict such craziness. This is a delight. Go see.
