Sondheim’s Assassins
July 19, 2024
3Below Theater, San Jose
It’s pretty wild that 3Below scheduled this show for a July 13 opening night. They canceled that performance (understandably), but the Attempt on Trump has certainly added an extra layer to the show’s meanings. At a time when the right wants to whitewash anything unseemly about our country’s past, it’s refreshing to hash out some of our ugliest moments in such a bold manner. Consider this one required viewing.
Jon Gourdine and Scott Guggenheim’s set presents the assassination parade as half-carnival, half-horserace. Each criminal is given a chair and a chute under a Vegas-style sign reading TAKE YOUR SHOT. Out comes The Proprietor, a character reminiscent of the Emcee from Cabaret. Kristi Garcia makes the most of it, deploying an impressive array of sly expressions and dazzling red hat and tails to play the role of temptress. The festive opening number says it all: “Everybody’s Got the Right.” (To kill the President.)
Arriving next is The Balladeer, which Jeremy Kreamer performs in an amiable Guthrie/Seeger fashion. His likeability presents a bit of a gut-punch later in the show, when he transforms into Lee Harvey Oswald.
The dubious roll call kicks off with John Wilkes Booth, who seems downright noble compared to the rest of the crazies. Stephen Guggenheim is a perfect match for this role, possessing the needed flash and intelligence for Booth, whose success as an actor meant that he didn’t need the fame sought by so many of the others. The highlight is a monologue in which Booth references the funeral lament of the widow Loman in Death of a Salesman - “Attention must be paid!” - to describe the quiet desperation of his successors.
Meanwhile, a great portion of the show’s appeal comes from recounting the assassins most people don’t know about, including:
Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley, citing the hardships of American laborers. Omar Alejandro plays the part with particular intensity, both of person and (baritone) voice.
Charles Guiteau, a spirited con man who shot James Garfield (the greatest President who never had a chance to govern) because he didn’t grant him an ambassadorship to France. Dario Johnson did a fine job of projecting both Guiteau’s showy positivity and utter lack of substance, especially in his gospel-tinged farewell, “The Ballad of Guiteau.”
Samuel Byck, who dressed like Santa Claus and recorded messages to celebrities (including Sondheim cohort Leonard Bernstein), while working up the nerve to fly his private plane into Richard Nixon’s White House. Rick Haffner is excellent and funny, painting Byck as a sort of left-leaning Archie Bunker.
Fortunately, Sondheim and book writer John Weidman didn’t stop there. They had great fun spinning fanciful combinations. Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley (Alexandra Shephard and Ryan Sammonds) perform a beautiful love song, “Unworthy of Your Love,” to their dreamboats, Charles Manson and Jodie Foster. The show’s climactic scene has Booth pleading with Oswald to take his notorious shots - and thereby restore the reputations of their infamous little club.
The show accidentally solves a great problem of Sondheim, which is his tendency to overuse his favorite musical devices. With Assassins, he draws on numerous historical sources, including folk, jazz, gospel and minstrelsy, which broadens his palette.
The performance I attended suffered some technical glitches, including the rebooting of a monitor during the show. Even this, however, provided some accidental meanings. The poor tech was stuck on a menu guide that kept returning to an ad for Dateline. Perhaps our assassination attempts are now merely another form of entertainment, as witnessed by the fashionable wearing of ear bandages.
Through August 4 at 3Below, 288 S. Second Street, San Jose. 408/404-7711, 3belowtheaters.com. $25-$65.
Michael J. Vaughn is a forty-year opera and theater critic, and the author of 29 novels, including Mermaids’ Tears and Punks for the Opera, available at Amazon.