Tonight, for my friend Seth's birthday, we saw Assassins by Stephen Sondheim, which was put on by the Shotgun Players. The house was packed, and the run has been extended to November 11th, but I was a bit underwhelmed.
Partially it's the play. I was never a huge Sondheim fan, and as a play Assassins is a bit meh. The songs are definitely minor. I mean, here's the big Broadway cast, at the Tony Award telecast, and it's still weak tea:
The theme of the play is basically that Presidential assassins are pathetic losers. Sure, but how about all those dead Presidents, huh? Huh? NOW WHO'S THE PATHETIC LOSER?!? We get a chance to revel in the audacity of assassination for a song or two ("Just a single little finger/Can change the world") but mostly the irony of these pathetic losers sometimes actually managing to kill a President is left unexplored. Partially this is due to the structure of the play—the assassins, successful and failed, only have one another to play off of, and not their victims or even other Americans. So we end up with Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore trying to do a little business with a KFC bucket and a pair of pistols. One would think that the failures (Byck, Moore, etc.) and the successes (Booth, Guiteau, etc) would form factions, and if Guiteau is both a pathetic loser and and success at this one thing, well, good, then you have a bit of conflict.
The play is also harmed by Sondheim's fascination with the assassination of JFK, a fascination typical of people alive at the time of JFK's death. But was JFK's assassination really more of a shock to the "national psyche" (for lack of a better phrase) than Lincoln's? I suspect not. So we have some goofy characters, a few catchy songs, a larger number of very uncatchy songs, and an upside-down theme—and that's the raw material for this production.
The Shotgun Players are, of course, a small regional group. They work out of an oddly shaped room, and placed the band accompanying the actors in the back of it. The actors were given headphone mics, and one of them—the "balladeer"—was also given a banjo, which his headphone mic picked up. The end result was loud music that easy drowned out relatively weak voices, with the exceptions of Rebecca Castelli as Sara Jane Moore and Galen Murphy-Hoffman as John Wilkes Booth. And guess which actors were members of Actors Equity? Ding ding! The rest, not so much.
This production also made two unfortunate choices. The "proprietor" character was painted to look like Beetlejuice and was doing too much of a Faustian carnival barker routine. The balladeer is transformed into Lee Harvey Oswald, which is what happened in the 2004 revival of the play, but which is nonsensical and stupid. Having Oswald silently hang around with the other assassins until his star turn—which is what happened in earlier productions—would have been much more powerful.
I was disappointed. I hate a great time across town a few weeks ago at a competing theater, with its production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, but for this show at least the Shotgun Players do not compare to the Aurora Theater. If you're some sort of Sondheim completist and a local, see it. If not, go see four movies for the price of the ticket instead.
While at Shotguns though, I saw a flyer for their their Halloween-themed one-night show Everyday Monsters: A Twilight Zone Trilogy, for only $15 a ticket, so I bought tickets for it immediately. I'm pleased to give 'em a second chance.
Partially it's the play. I was never a huge Sondheim fan, and as a play Assassins is a bit meh. The songs are definitely minor. I mean, here's the big Broadway cast, at the Tony Award telecast, and it's still weak tea:
The theme of the play is basically that Presidential assassins are pathetic losers. Sure, but how about all those dead Presidents, huh? Huh? NOW WHO'S THE PATHETIC LOSER?!? We get a chance to revel in the audacity of assassination for a song or two ("Just a single little finger/Can change the world") but mostly the irony of these pathetic losers sometimes actually managing to kill a President is left unexplored. Partially this is due to the structure of the play—the assassins, successful and failed, only have one another to play off of, and not their victims or even other Americans. So we end up with Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore trying to do a little business with a KFC bucket and a pair of pistols. One would think that the failures (Byck, Moore, etc.) and the successes (Booth, Guiteau, etc) would form factions, and if Guiteau is both a pathetic loser and and success at this one thing, well, good, then you have a bit of conflict.
The play is also harmed by Sondheim's fascination with the assassination of JFK, a fascination typical of people alive at the time of JFK's death. But was JFK's assassination really more of a shock to the "national psyche" (for lack of a better phrase) than Lincoln's? I suspect not. So we have some goofy characters, a few catchy songs, a larger number of very uncatchy songs, and an upside-down theme—and that's the raw material for this production.
The Shotgun Players are, of course, a small regional group. They work out of an oddly shaped room, and placed the band accompanying the actors in the back of it. The actors were given headphone mics, and one of them—the "balladeer"—was also given a banjo, which his headphone mic picked up. The end result was loud music that easy drowned out relatively weak voices, with the exceptions of Rebecca Castelli as Sara Jane Moore and Galen Murphy-Hoffman as John Wilkes Booth. And guess which actors were members of Actors Equity? Ding ding! The rest, not so much.
This production also made two unfortunate choices. The "proprietor" character was painted to look like Beetlejuice and was doing too much of a Faustian carnival barker routine. The balladeer is transformed into Lee Harvey Oswald, which is what happened in the 2004 revival of the play, but which is nonsensical and stupid. Having Oswald silently hang around with the other assassins until his star turn—which is what happened in earlier productions—would have been much more powerful.
I was disappointed. I hate a great time across town a few weeks ago at a competing theater, with its production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, but for this show at least the Shotgun Players do not compare to the Aurora Theater. If you're some sort of Sondheim completist and a local, see it. If not, go see four movies for the price of the ticket instead.
While at Shotguns though, I saw a flyer for their their Halloween-themed one-night show Everyday Monsters: A Twilight Zone Trilogy, for only $15 a ticket, so I bought tickets for it immediately. I'm pleased to give 'em a second chance.