Reconstructions: 'Jumpers,' 'Bombay Dreams' & 'Assassins'

Commonweal, June 18, 2004 by Celia Wren

Assassins had a brief run at New York's Playwrights Horizons in 1991, but the show has never before reached Broadway; the revival the Roundabout had scheduled for 2001 was postponed in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Time seems only to have burnished the musical's chances: Joe Mantello has crafted a mesmerizing production, lucid and sinister, and populated by theatrical aristocrats like Neil Patrick Harris (who played Doogie Howser on television). Of particular note are the loudmouthed comedian Mario Cantone as Samuel Byck (who tried to hijack a jetliner and crash it into Nixon's White House, in 1974), and the extraordinary Denis O'Hare, as Charles Guiteau, who slew James Garfield in 1881. O'Hare portrays Guiteau as a crazed oddball, with a lisp and childish mannerisms, like the way he flourishes a book of theology he published, smacking the volume against his palm. In one especially memorable scene recreating Guiteau's walk to the gallows, O'Hare dances up a staircase, warbling a ballad.

Designer Robert Brill has set the assassins' fairground beneath a ramshackle dome-shaped scaffold, which the staircase ascends and which, at least one critic has noted, resembles the underside of a roller coaster. But the scaffold also looks like a half-built hall, and as Assassins unfolds, its deconstruction of American optimism explains the imagery. Sondheim's parable is set in a fanciful limbo, where a pot shot at the president can score you a stuffed animal, but this carnival is really not remote from our daily lives. Our gospel of freedom and opportunity produces these assassins. The dome is half-built because we're constructing it ourselves.