Assassins
Theater review by Adam Feldman John Doyle made his New York reputation with the 2005 Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, and since then he has directed four other musicals by Stephen Sondheim, including two as artistic director of Off Broadway’s Classic Stage Company. This is his final season at CSC, and as a parting shot he now gives us one more: Assassins, Sondheim and John Weidman’s dark 1990 masterpiece about the rogues’ gallery of losers, obsessives and malcontents who have tried to kill the President of the United States. Doyle has the ammo to get the job done—a star-spangled cast of musical theater pros—but not the aim. As scattershot as this production sometimes seems, however, it hits enough targets to draw blood. Assassins is mostly structured as a kind of purgatorial revue. In a fairground shooting gallery in limbo, a Proprietor (Eddie Cooper) invites shadowy figures from American history to step up and make a play for the prize: a chance to be heard, a place in history, whatever it is they think they want. In songs and sketches, these killers and would-be killers—from John Wilkes Booth (Steven Pasquale) to John Hinckley (Adam Chanler-Berat)—interact with one another, plead their demented causes and bemoan their exclusion from the American Dream. “There’s another national anthem playing / Not the one you cheer at the ballpark,” they sing, chillingly. “It’s the other national anthem saying—/ If you want to hear—/ It says, ‘Bullshit!’ / It says, ‘Never!’ / It says, ’S