Assassins-City Center
Opening Night: July 12, 2017
Closing: July 15, 2017
Theater: New York City Center
A carnival ride through the history of political violence, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1990 musical Assassins looks right into the heart of American anger, providing sensational showstoppers for a gallery of U.S. presidential assassins ranging from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald to Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. Assassins offers an uncanny vision of where we are today, where we might be going, and whether everybody really has the right to their dreams.
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July 13, 2017
Two of the last three Tony Award-winning best musicals — “Fun Home” and “Dear Evan Hansen” — have featured suicide as a central plot point. Other recent winners have spoofed serial killing and mocked religion. Still, I submit that the most shocking mainstream musical ever written is the 26-year-old “Assassins,” which begins with an invitation to “C’mon and shoot a president” and then goes considerably further. The shock is not just in the daring but in — pardon me — the execution. John Weidman’s book situates nine of the country’s would-be presidential assassins, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley, in a metaphysical shooting gallery and lets them goad one another across time. Stephen Sondheim’s score explores their motivations, but also, in its pungent use of American pastiche, burrows deep into the national character that bred them.
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