Assassins

[April 26th, 2006] [STAGE] A musical comedy about killing the president? That's right. Artists Repertory Theatre's next show, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins (based on an idea by Charles Gilbert Jr.), brings together nine men and women who at one time or another attempted to kill the U.S. president to tell—or sing—their side of the story. The Portland production, directed by Jon Kretzu, features Kirk Mouser as Lincoln-dropper John Wilkes Booth and the omnipresent Wade McCollum (Hedwig, One, the phone book) as Kennedy-killer Lee Harvey Oswald.

Apart from the subject matter, Assassins is a typical Sondheim production: The plot is nonlinear and surreal; the music, brilliant and tremendously varied, but almost unsingable; and the cast is full of unsettling antiheroes whom we like despite our better judgement.

Assassins has had a difficult stage history. The show's '91 off-Broadway debut had the misfortune to coincide with the kickoff of Operation Desert Storm and was panned as morbid and unpatriotic by critics caught up in the jingoistic fervor of the much larger production. A Broadway revival planned for November 2001 was delayed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The untimely show finally hit Broadway in 2004.

Because of its dark subject matter, most productions of Assassins have focused on the play's more comedic elements, playing the assassins more as caricatures of extremists than as real people. For ART's production, director Kretzu has taken a different approach: "What I've tried to do is base [the performance] in the reality of who these people were and find the core humanity in all of them," he told WW. "There are a lot of very brutal, emotional and scary things going on in this piece, and I want to turn the theater into a real boiling pot."

For all the controversy it's gathered to date, Assassins is unlikely to raise eyebrows in Portland. After five years under the Bush administration, many theatergoers have likely entertained fantasies of abrupt regime change. Kretzu says now is "a particularly apropos and chilling time to be doing the production." He's right. In times as dark as these, Sondheim's hilarious and disturbing black comedy is a bitter antidote to chronic despair. As the dancing assassins in the show's opening number remind us, "Everybody's got a right to their dreams."