Active Shooters

Assassins at Encores! Off-Center.

Clifton Duncan (far left), Steven Pasquale (upstage center), and the cast of Assassins.

            The curiously subdued production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins playing at New York City Center through July 15th as part of Encores! Off-Center is really more like two shows.  The first stars Steven Pasquale as a grandiose, booming John Wilkes Booth, a force of history whose obsession with being understood by future generations drives him to inspire presidential assassinations throughout history.  This show could stand to be shorter.  The second stars Clifton Duncan as the Balladeer, a charming man on the street with his hands in his pockets and his sleeves rolled up who recounts the stories of misguided presidential assassins with a genially shrugging grin on his face.  This one could stand to be much longer.

            Or maybe it’s three shows.  There’s the Pasquale starrer, which is more like an opera, and the Duncan starrer, which is more like a musical, and then there’s another show, about, mostly, Samuel Byck (Danny Wolohan), who tried to kill Nixon, Sara Jane Moore (Victoria Clark), Ford, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Erin Markey), ditto.  That one’s more like a comic straight play, full of Weidman’s most palpable toxic fear and anger, and it’s great, and they’re all great in it.  But... maybe it’s four shows, because one can’t leave out the entirely separate historical pastiche of revue-inflected one-off numbers like “Unworthy of Your Love” or “Something Just Broke…”

            You get the idea.  The strength of the original productions of Assassins, in 1990 (Off-Broadway) and 2004 (Broadway), was that they provided showcases for craftsmen at the top of their game.  They were invitations for melodic experimentation (Sondheim), pitch-black satire (Weidman), and explosive, transformative performances (Victor Garber as Booth in 1990 and Neil Patrick Harris as the Balladeer in 2004).  Though the show was and is perfectly integrated, it’s delicate, and one element of weakness, one instance of poor casting, one moment of resting on Sondheim’s laurels, and those four or five or six shows don’t coalesce into the perfect, if uncomfortable, evening at the theater that Assassins can be.  Unfortunately, that’s what happens here.

            Let’s talk about that first show to start.  Imperfectly cast, disparate in tone, and practically inaudible (the sound design, by Leon Rothenberg, is not up to his standards), the sections of the show that feature the titular assassins under-serves some remarkable performers (Alex Brightman, as Giuseppe Zangara, and Pasquale first among them) and front-loads some undeserving ones -- like Steven Boyer (as John Hinckley, Jr.), who can’t sing, and Ethan Lipton (as the menacing Proprietor) who can’t sing or act.  Unlike most semi-staged Encores! Concerts, in which scripts are used sparingly and subtly, three-quarters of the way through the production the actors all suddenly emerge with binders, which are never again to leave their hands, almost like they got part of the way through rehearsing and ran out of time.  Boyer, so miraculous in Hand to God, focuses so hard on playing the guitar during “Unworthy of Your Love,” Hinckley and Fromme’s pitch-perfect ode to the objects of their obsession, that he effectively forgets to project.  Everyone involved in this production, up to and including the director, Anne Kauffman, appears to have been studying really hard for something in the lead-up to this production, but it doesn’t appear to have been the text.

            What a breath of fresh air is that second show!  Clifton Duncan, a dynamo who’s long deserved his break, gets it here as the narrator, a relaxed, happy-go-lucky take on the Balladeer.  He’s the best singer in the show by far, and connects with the audience right from the start -- his second sung line, the politically relevant wisecrack “Every now and then the country / Goes a little wrong,” was followed by applause so thunderous it threatened to turn into a standing ovation.  Remarkably, the show, which is by and large sleepy, is worth seeing merely for his performance.  Unluckily, that performance is stunted by another directorial mistake -- the great appeal of Neil Patrick Harris’s turn in the same role on Broadway was the deadening shock of watching our only friend on stage morph into Lee Harvey Oswald, a historical empty vessel at the end of his rope, by show’s end.  In Kauffman’s take, Oswald is played by Cory Michael Smith in what amounts to a cameo, and the Balladeer disappears without warning, without any resolution to a great, sinister character arc.

            This makes the show sound worse than it is mainly because the production makes the show seem worse than it is.  Assassins is a masterpiece, plain and simple, but the trouble with Kauffman’s production is that it doesn’t hit on why that is.  Nobody on stage, from Pasquale to Brightman, is the least bit scary.  If a chorus line of homicidal maniacs can flit through the background of an audience’s world without blinking an eye, then either New York has started to desensitize its citizens or, to quote Sondheim, in this case, “something just broke.”