Assassins
Stephen Sondheim
Book by John Wiedman
Directed by Bruce Guthrie
Royal Academy Musical Theatre
If you assassinate an American president, you change the world and will always be remembered. We’ve all heard of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. And look at Brutus – it’s over two thousand years since he murdered Julius Caesar but his fame lives on.
It all depends how much fame matters to you. Dating from 1990, and not one of Sondheim’s best known shows, Assassins wittily explores the concept of fame through the stories of nine assassins – four who succeeded in killing American presidents and five who failed. It’s clever, poignant and thrusting as you’d expect from Sondheim who, in this show, includes a couple of music-free episodes although there’s also a great deal of his trademark text set to music which runs impeccably with the rhythms.
This revival is flamboyantly staged and energetically choreographed (Ben Hartley) with a fine cast of sixteen. Two casts do two performances each so a total of 32 students are involved. At the performance I saw, Issac Wray shone as Samuel Byck, Matthew Arnold excelled as Charles Guiteau and Jelani Munroe commanded the stage both as Balladeer and then as Lee Harvey Oswald in a wonderfully done, almost-Biblical temptation scene. And we get a splendid theatrical tour de force when he finally pulls the trigger – noise, projected headlines, balloons, light and smoke as the world changes, in an instant, forever.
This is a richly talented company, all of whom, have strong careers ahead of them if that’s what they go on wanting. Also doing a fine job, as usual, is the Musical Theatre Orchestra in the pit delivering all those cross rhythms and timing the entries when the music cuts across speech.
Before the show, I spoke briefly in the RAM café to a couple who were about my age. We chuckled about the all-bases-covered trigger warning in the programme: “sexual violence, violence including guns and gunshots, death, suicide, self-harm, strong language and flashing lights”. We septugenarians reckoned we had seen and heard it all before and could cope. Joking apart though, it quickly became mildly irritating that the students in the audience – keen to support their friends – tittered every time anyone on stage said “fuck”. Time for a bit of growing up?
