'Assassins' hits the bullseye, both amusing and politically resonant

Drunk, garrulous and wearing an oversized Santa suit, Samuel Byck (Max Rosmarin ’11), the man who tried to kill Richard Nixon, ponders how to fix the country. “Let’s hold an election!” he jests into a Playskool tape recorder. “The Democrat says he’ll fix everything the Republicans fucked up, the Republican says he’ll fix everything the Democrats fucked up. Who’s telling us the truth? Who’s lying? Someone’s lying!”

This hilarious monologue is one of the comic highlights of “Assassins,” presented by the Princeton University Players (PUP) through Saturday in the Class of 1970 Theater at Whitman College. Directed by Brandon Lowden ’09 and featuring music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a script by John Weidman, the dark and timely musical questions how far we can take America’s promise of the right to pursue happiness and challenges the audience to rethink what has been written in our country’s history.

How much has changed in the nearly 20 years since this musical was written, and how much will change? “Oil embargos, megatons and holes in the ozone,” Byck complains, “who can understand this crap?” Loosely taking the form of a vaudeville revue, the musical uses its monologues and musical numbers to give voice to the nine men and women who tried or succeeded in killing American presidents, mixing historical fact with imagined scenes to explore what led these people to such desperate acts.

The show opens at an otherworldly carnival where the Proprietor, played here with devilish charm by a strong-voiced Stephen Lamb ’11, lures the nine disgruntled outsiders to his shooting gallery. Killing a president, he says, will help them achieve their dreams: impressing a girl, fighting injustice, becoming famous or just making people listen.

The musical looks first at the man who started it all: John Wilkes Booth (Billy Hepfinger ’10), the infamous assassin of Abraham Lincoln. While Hepfinger must contend with a cumbersome full-length dress coat and a sad strip of painted-on moustache, by the end of “The Ballad of Booth,” he has the audience sympathizing with his character, so often portrayed as a racist scoundrel.

Keeping the boastful assassins and our view of them in check is the Balladeer (Spencer Case ’09), who narrates the show from outside the action. Clad all in white, Case suggests a peculiar sort of superhero, often striking an almighty pose with his fists on his hips as he tsk-tsks the assassins with his pop-influenced tenor and trying to convince them that the world isn’t all that bad.

The group’s two female assassins, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Phoenix Gonzalez ’11) and Sara Jane Moore (Kathy Harwood ’12), elicit laughs in the scene where Fromme declares herself the lover and slave of famed mass murderer Charles Manson while Moore munches from a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket.

Rounding out the exceptionally well-cast gang of assassins are the intense but oddly sweet John Hinckley, Jr. (Dave Holtz ’10); the funny and charismatic aspiring theologist and politician Charles Guiteau (Dan Corica ’12); the sullen and self-deprecating Leon Czolgosz (Rob Olson ’11); and the Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara (Joey Barnett ’11).

The audience is captivated as the assassins, one at a time, come to the culmination of their journeys and get the chance to shoot at their targets. But the emotional impact of each of these moments is lessened by the weakness of the sound effects. Throughout the show, the sound of gunshots comes off too subdued, too muffled. The shots need to ring out to jar the audience and remind it what the artfully depicted moment truly represents.

A standout from the fine ensemble is Amy Vickery ’12, who shines in “Something Just Broke,” a moment apart from the deranged mindset of the assassins. In the song, average Americans from different periods in American history recall how they learned their presidents had been shot. The only hindrance here is the bizarre and overly literal choreography: The number would have been much better served had these ensemble players just stood still in the dim light and sung out their shock.

The ensemble is, appropriately, dressed uniformly, so that it appears united as a group separate from the assassins, who wear clothes iconic of their respective eras. The ensemble’s uniform, however, is too literally a uniform, making it look like a group of schoolchildren. While this may be an intriguing idea, it prevents the cast from representing the diverse group of Americans they should be.

PUP’s “Assassins” is a strong production of a timely musical that showcases some of the campus’ finest singing and acting talents and raises important questions about the “American Dream.” It’s a “free country,” the Proprietor quips at the beginning of the show. If Americans are promised the right to pursue happiness, why shouldn’t they take action when they don’t get it?