President Killers and Princess Diana Find Musical Immortality

“Assassins” and “Diana: The Musical” turn tragic history into song.
Three characters in shadow holding guns
A revival of Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical “Assassins” couldn’t be more upbeat.Illustration by Manddy Wyckens

The pleasure to be had from the stripped-down revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” at the Classic Stage Company (under the direction of John Doyle) is so giddy and deep that it occurred to me only after I had left the theatre, with the show’s jauntier melodies still ringing in my ears, that it might count as guilty, too. “Assassins,” which skips through more than a century of bloody American history in a little less than two hours, is about losers: the desperate and the deluded, people who were stepped on and ground down until they decided that their only recourse was to grab a gun and point it at the President. “Free country / Means they listen to you,” the show’s opening number goes, and we do listen, thanks to Sondheim’s music and lyrics. (The show’s book is by John Weidman, based on a great, perverse idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr.) Try not to hum along as John Wilkes Booth (Steven Pasquale), John Hinckley, Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat), Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme (Tavi Gevinson), and the rest of this band of murderous misfits serenade you with their conviction that, per Thomas Jefferson, “everybody’s got the right to be happy.”

That this pitch-dark show should be so light on its feet reverses the recent trend of musical revivals that cast a chilly shadow over familiar song and sunshine. In 2019, Daniel Fish turned “Oklahoma!” from a celebration of American expansionism into a grim treatise on American selfishness and brutality. “Carousel,” with its themes of violence and murder, grew gloomier still in Jack O’Brien’s 2018 production. But “Assassins,” which deals with the slimy underbelly of American dreams, couldn’t be more upbeat. That’s what gives the show its eerie power. These grandiose lunatics and disappointed idealists have us grinning along from the get-go; they all sought fame, that elixir of eternal life, and Sondheim has given it to them. So who gets the last laugh?

According to the Balladeer (the appealing Ethan Slater), we do. Armed, like Woody Guthrie, not with a pistol but with a guitar, he guides us through this particular circle of the American underworld with optimistic sanity, starting at the barn where an injured John Wilkes Booth is hiding out. Booth wants it recorded, for posterity, that he put a bullet through Abraham Lincoln’s head to avenge the South, to save the nation from tyranny, yada yada yada. The Balladeer has other ideas. “Some say it was your voice had gone / Some say it was booze,” he taunts. “They say you killed a country, John / Because of bad reviews.” He’s more sympathetic to the downtrodden anarchist Leon Czolgosz (Brandon Uranowitz), a factory worker whose furious analysis of capitalist oppression is spot on—though his assassination of William McKinley doesn’t do much to stop it—and to Charles Guiteau (Will Swenson, electric with comic charisma), an unhinged self-promoter who cakewalks his way to the gallows after he offs James Garfield for refusing to name him Ambassador to France. “Lots of madmen / have had their say,” the Balladeer reassures us, “but only for a day.” Because this is Sondheim, and all harmonies are bound to curdle into dissonance, you can guess that that message won’t stand up to scrutiny. By the end of the show, the Balladeer will have shed his hopeful pep and, in a moment of pure horror, transformed into Lee Harvey Oswald.

There’s something of a “Breakfast Club” feel to this ragtag crew, united in the detention hall of history. Booth suggests to the luckless Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara (Wesley Taylor) that he try to cure his intractable stomach problems by shooting F.D.R. Gerald Ford’s pair of would-be killers—Fromme, an acolyte and self-described “lover and slave” of Charles Manson, and Sara Jane Moore (Judy Kuhn), a square serial divorcée with mysterious motives—didn’t schmooze in life, but onstage they bond over their daddy issues while using a bucket of KFC chicken for target practice. Then, there’s Samuel Byck (Andy Grotelueschen), the disgruntled crackpot who tried to hijack a plane and fly it into Richard Nixon’s White House, pouring out his troubles on a tape recording that he intends to send to Leonard Bernstein. (Sondheim has fun riffing on “West Side Story”; if you’ve got the rights, flaunt ’em.) Byck may be nuts—he wears a grungy Santa suit—but his grievances don’t sound all that unreasonable. The world is increasingly unmanageable. There’s a hole in the ozone layer; a Saudi prince has bought Howard Johnson’s. You can see where he’s coming from.

When “Assassins” premièred, in 1990, reaction to it was sharply divided; a retooled revival, slated for 2001, was postponed for three years, for fear of offending audiences’ resurgent patriotism after 9/11. The current production was intended for 2020; thematically, the delay has been Doyle’s friend, though he faces other challenges. Surrounded by the audience on three sides, the C.S.C.’s peninsula of a stage makes it hard to hear the performers when they turn their backs, and the quality of the sound was uneven the afternoon I saw the show, with Pasquale’s quiet menace, for instance, oddly muted compared with Swenson’s antic, clarion command. But the unusual space, with its wooden roof and brick walls, makes the production feel intimate, and the musicians who wander among the cast in red, white, and blue jumpsuits give the setting a square-dance atmosphere, with a sound, heavy on the fiddle, that suits Sondheim’s Americana inspirations.

“There’s another national anthem playing / Not the one you cheer,” someone sings, late in the show. We know that other anthem, laced with cynicism and despair, and some of us like to sing it, too. At the show’s end, an image of the January 6th riot is projected above the stage, but though Doyle’s message seems to be plus ça change, the past we’ve just watched makes an ill-fitting precedent for the uncharted present. We know what it looks like for someone to want to kill the person in charge. What we don’t know is what happens when the person in charge wants to kill us. “Something just broke,” as the show says. It won’t be fixed soon.

As bright American myths are being popped in “Assassins,” anemic English ones are sprouting like weeds in the lustreless “Diana: The Musical” (at the Longacre, directed by Christopher Ashley, with music and lyrics by David Bryan and additional lyrics by Joe DiPietro, who wrote the book). The show’s accomplishment is to make you wish, after two hours of power-pop crooning, that the poor Princess of Wales (Jeanna de Waal) had been allowed to keep some last shred of her mystery and celebrated glamour. The extraordinary circumstances that brokered Diana’s marriage, and then trapped her in it, are, as the show keeps pointing out, those of a fairy tale gone wrong, but the troubles of the marriage itself—a bad match compounded by philandering—could hardly be more banal. When, in the first act, Diana considers ditching her wedding, it’s too late; her name and image, as one character says, are already being used to sell tea towels and mugs. Now they’re being used to sell tickets on Broadway. Plus ça change, indeed.

With documentaries, miniseries, movies, and now a musical, we’re reaching a Diana saturation point. One odd new perspective that this show has to offer is its take on victimhood. Diana is presented as a victim of circumstance, naturally, but so are Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf) and, weirdly, Queen Elizabeth (Judy Kaye), who is given an eleventh-hour number in which she gets to feel sad about abandonment issues in her own marriage. Prince Philip, who, whatever his other qualities, stuck by his wife for seventy-three years, is really the abandoned one here; we see neither hide nor hair of him. The show’s villains are the paparazzi, who are dressed like Inspector Gadget and do some twirly dances (choreographed by Kelly Devine) involving flashbulbs and flaring trenchcoats, and Camilla Parker Bowles (Erin Davie, bringing subtle feeling to the bland proceedings), who manages to once again upstage Diana by being infinitely more interesting. Actually, the story does turn out to be a fairy tale: Camilla, deprived for years of her heart’s true desire, finally gets her prince. ♦