Assassins

Actors love playing villains – and Assassins delivers a whole fruitcake tin of them. The Hayes Theatre has baked the loonies together, inside the most stunning set, combined with the tastiest of ensembles, to create a positively scrumptious result. 

The biggest surprise is to read the program afterwards, when you discover that Sondheim and Weidman didn’t have to make much up about the motley crew of ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ assassins of the Presidents of the United States over the years.  

Charles Guiteau (played elegantly and delightfully by Bobby Fox) did in fact smile and wave to the crowds on the way to the gallows for assassinating the 20^th President of the United States, James A Garfield, in 1881. Bobby Fox’s stunning dance with a fluorescent rope (a highlight of the production) was not so much of a stretch.

John Wilkes Booth (David Campbell) brandished a knife and announced from the stage a quote attributed to Brutus (the assassin of Caesar) after shooting Abraham Lincoln inside a theatre.  Anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz (Jason Kos) did defiantly declare that he was not sorry for his crime of assassinating US President William McKinley in 1901, just before he met his fate on an electric chair.

Add to this John Hinckley Jr.’s (Connor Crawford) infatuation with Jodie Foster, that prompted his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, and the lesser known failed attempts on Gerald Ford by Sara Jane Moore (Kate Cole) and Richard Nixon by Samuel Joseph Byck (Justin Smith).

Blending these and a few other assorted crackpots together is the most stunning set and costume design by Alicia Clements (that was built at Belvoir).  It looks, feels and smells like a decaying carnival. Letters and other assorted misfit objects are elegantly lit as they rotate and glide across the stage, the piece de resistance being a rusty old dodgem car. Where did they find that I wondered?  Nowhere I was told, it was made from scratch. What a difference having both passion and a healthy budget can make to a production.

Assassins leads inevitably to the killing that hits closest to the bone – that of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald.  Recent graduate Maxwell Simon looked every inch the brooding character that was Oswald, as all the motley crew of killers return to the stage to urge him on.

These are not just troubled individuals but a whole nation troubled by a gun culture and love of celebrity, where in every generation obscure characters are tempted to change the world by moving one little finger on a gun and having their names etched in history. Onto the wall flicks a picture of Donald Trump prompting a murmur from the opening night audience.

This was a mind spinning and brilliant production.  

David Spicer

Photographer: Phil Erbacher.