Assassins

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by John Weidman

Flying Penguin Productions

and Adelaide Festival Centre iNspace Program

The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, South Australia

December 7-15, 2007.

Directed by David Mealor

Music Director Matthew Carey

There have been four Australian productions of Assassins since it first opened Off-Broadway in 1990 and was remounted in London in 1992. And, of those, only two have been professional productions – the Melbourne Theatre Company version in 1995 and this, most recent staging, by Adelaide company, Flying Penguin Productions whose Artistic Director, David Mealor has gathered credits and awards for a fine production of Brian Friels’ Translations and, recently, an inventive reading of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.

Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins has been a venture Mealor has long wanted to produce – ever since, in fact, he and a number of the cast were first introduced to the songs by Professor Michael Morley, music theatre expert at the Flinders University Drama Centre in Adelaide, during their undergraduate days back in the early 1990s when Sondheim’s provocatively imaginative work first appeared.

Timing and context are always important for performance works – and never more so than for Assassins. The history of delay and the coincidence of performances of this explosive work with national and international events will be well familiar to readers of this journal – the outbreak of the First Gulf War and the tragic events of September 11 both forced Assassins into strategic retreat and, one might observe, that given the high anxiety of much of the present decade, even the decision to revive the show in 2004 was a courageous one.

I am remarking on this because Australia has been close to White House foreign policy since 9/11, joined the so-called Coalition of the Willing, and, under eleven years of the conservative Howard government, has experienced apprehensions about national security, introduced new interpretations of sedition, and shown a distinct wariness in testing freedom of speech. In this same period our theatre and popular culture has tended to be placid, uninquisitive, and sensitive to accusations of being unpatriotic or anti-American. Interestingly, this Adelaide production of Assassins took to the stage less than two weeks after a federal election which marked a political sea change, bringing in a centrist Labor government with an exit strategy for Iraq, and a plan to return the Australian -US alliance to a more flexible and independent footing.

So, as all texts have a context, performed in this particular time in the political cycle, Flying Penguins’ Assassins is an especially  potent, questioning and timely work. Featuring fifteen actors and a band of nine, the company  set up Sondheim and Weidman’s tent show shooting gallery in the relatively confined dimensions of The Space Theatre. Under David Mealor’s diligent direction and with music led by Matthew Carey (with Michael Morley as his associate) the cast bring gusto and memorable shading to the characterisations. Physically imposing and stentorian, Christopher Matters is impressive as Booth, navigating the “Brutus” arguments against  the tyrant Lincoln. This strongly sets the interrogating tone of the piece as the assassins are given, not only voice, but Sondheim’s splendidly nimble and nuanced songs to state their views.

Peter Michell is excellent as Zangara, the discontented emigre, as is Rory Walker as Czolgosz, the disillusioned prole. Stephen Sheehan’s Guiteau, with his  sauntering cakewalk to the scaffold, is startling in its manic comedy, and in the grimness of its delusion-  providing, like Michaela Cantwell’s carefully managed soliliquoy  as Squeaky Fromm, one of those spellbinding key moments which Sondheim’s theatre so uncannily creates. Similarly, Syd Brisbane’s Samuel Byck – sardonic, quietly furious, and blackly vengeful – is splendidly judged.

The inclusion of Cameron Goodall, impish as the Balladeer and boyishly innocent as Lee Harvey Oswald, derails the usual preconceptions of the assassin as his henchpersons gather around him to sing “Take a Look, Lee”. Australian audiences respond strongly to the fetishised presence of the gun in Assassins as we do to the additional song, “Something Just Broke” which was accompanied by split screen projections of excerpts of the Zapruder film and, in a directorial choice which prompted much discussion –  the use of fleeting images of the Falling Man on September 11, directly connecting the atrocities of that day with the unspeakable aspect, the dark heart of the polis, which is the eloquent, difficult, and necessary subject of Assassins.

Murray Bramwell

Drama Department

Flinders University

South Australia

Sondheim Journal (US) Feb 2008.