Assassins<\/p>\n
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim<\/p>\n
Book by John Weidman<\/p>\n
Flying Penguin Productions<\/p>\n
and Adelaide Festival Centre iNspace Program<\/p>\n
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, South Australia<\/p>\n
December 7-15, 2007.<\/p>\n
Directed by David Mealor<\/p>\n
Music Director Matthew Carey<\/p>\n
There have been four Australian productions of Assassins<\/em> since it first opened Off-Broadway in 1990 and was remounted in London in 1992. And, of those, only two have been professional productions \u2013 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\u2019 Translations<\/em> and, recently, an inventive reading of Harold Pinter\u2019s The Birthday Party<\/em>.<\/p>\n Stephen Sondheim\u2019s Assassins<\/em> has been a venture Mealor has long wanted to produce \u2013 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\u2019s provocatively imaginative work first appeared.<\/p>\n Timing and context are always important for performance works – and never more so than for Assassins<\/em>. 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 \u2013 the outbreak of the First Gulf War and the tragic events of September 11 both forced Assassins<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n So, as all texts have a context, performed in this particular time in the political cycle, Flying Penguins\u2019 Assassins<\/em> is an especially \u00a0potent, questioning and timely work. Featuring fifteen actors and a band of nine, the company\u00a0 set up Sondheim and Weidman\u2019s tent show shooting gallery in the relatively confined dimensions of The Space Theatre. Under David Mealor\u2019s 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 \u201cBrutus\u201d arguments against\u00a0 the tyrant Lincoln. This strongly sets the interrogating tone of the piece as the assassins are given, not only voice, but Sondheim\u2019s splendidly nimble and nuanced songs to state their views.<\/p>\n Peter Michell is excellent as Zangara, the discontented emigre, as is Rory Walker as Czolgosz, the disillusioned prole. Stephen Sheehan\u2019s Guiteau, with his \u00a0sauntering cakewalk to the scaffold, is startling in its manic comedy, and in the grimness of its delusion- \u00a0providing, like Michaela Cantwell\u2019s carefully managed soliliquoy\u00a0 as Squeaky Fromm, one of those spellbinding key moments which Sondheim\u2019s theatre so uncannily creates. Similarly, Syd Brisbane\u2019s Samuel Byck – sardonic, quietly furious, and blackly vengeful – is splendidly judged.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cTake a Look, Lee<\/em>\u201d. Australian audiences respond strongly to the fetishised presence of the gun in Assassins<\/em> as we do to the additional song, \u201cSomething Just Broke<\/em>\u201d which was accompanied by split screen projections of excerpts of the Zapruder film and, in a directorial choice which prompted much discussion – \u00a0the 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n Drama Department<\/p>\n Flinders University<\/p>\n South Australia<\/p>\n Sondheim Journal (US) Feb 2008.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2013 the Melbourne Theatre Company version in 1995 and this, most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adelaide-companies","category-archive","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}