John Weidman understands why America just wasn’t ready for “Assassins” at first. After all, the musical he had written with the legendary Stephen Sondheim depicted a man bent on flying a plane into the White House.
And that was in 1990.
“The country,” as John Wilkes Booth himself says in one of the most controversial musicals ever written, “is not what it was.”
America is certainly not what it was before terrorists attacked in 2001. It’s damaged, more fearful and in need of answers. When “Assassins” made it to Broadway 14 years later, New York Times critic Frank Rich opined, “9/11 finally has its own musical.”
“‘Assassins’ has a kind of resonance now for all Americans that it just didn’t have in 1990,” Weidman said of the show the Next Stage Theatre Company bows Friday in its regional premiere. It will be the first production anywhere to incorporate changes Weidman and Sondheim have approved since recent productions in New York and London.
“The country was a relatively comfortable and complacent place in 1990,” Weidman said. “In 2005, it simply isn’t. We live in more desperate political times, when the political actions of our leaders feel like they can have real and immediate consequences to individual persons in a way that was not the case before 9/11.
“We live in a completely different world now. I think people are more interested in listening to what these furious people who have attacked the ultimate symbol of the United States have to say about themselves.”
A fraternity of discontent
In American history, 13 people have tried to kill a U.S. president. Four have succeeded. Sondheim got the idea to gather most of them together on a stage from a Charles Gilbert play that depicted a Vietnam vet who conspires to attack the president. Before long, Sondheim and Weidman were fashioning songs and story lines for people who either killed or tried to kill sitting presidents: John Hinckley Jr., John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Leon Czolgosz, Charles Guiteau, Giuseppe Zangara, Samuel Byck and Sara Jane Moore.
“When Steve and I started looking at these characters, the conventional wisdom was that they had nothing in common with the rest of us, and very little in common with each other,” said Weidman. “Each one was just sort of this individual nut who had fallen to Earth from some other place. They were like diseases that cropped up from time to time. And while we’ve lived with the grief they have caused, there was nothing systemic to be addressed.”
Then they were struck by this notion: Our assassins and would-be assassins are peculiarly American in that nearly all of them represent some kind of apolitical displacement.
“Whenever the Russians tried to kill their czar, it was because they were trying to overthrow the government and change the way the country was run,” Weidman said. “When Hinckley attacked Ronald Reagan, he was trying to impress a movie star. When you think about it, these characters have more in common than not.”
While some claimed political motives, most were mentally ill or simply trying to solve their problems with a gun, he said.
“Assassins” collects these killers together in a deliberately disjointed, musical revue format without a conventional story or narrative. Its primary purpose is simply to investigate their motives within a blackly comic backdrop.
But still – musical theater?
“I was 17 when John Kennedy was assassinated, and it was the first real experience of loss that I had had in my life,” Weidman said. “The feelings associated with that event have never really healed, and it’s still difficult for me to look at what has now become this very familiar footage without really becoming as upset now as I did back then.
“I think on some level people of my generation who lived through that have difficulty with the idea that musical theater should be tackling such troubling material,” he said. “Especially in 1990, the notion of a musical about presidential assassination put a lot of people off who simply never saw it.”
Impossible to be passive
It was the show’s terrible misfortune to open in 1990 during the first Persian Gulf War, when it was buried under the patriotism fueled by Operation Desert Storm. A fall 2001 Broadway run was scrapped after 9/11.
And even though “Assassins” was more openly received when it finally opened on Broadway in 2004, it lasted only three months and got kicked around by many critics. But while audiences in 1990 leaned back, arms crossed, Weidman said, 2004 audiences ” were able to lean forward and really listen to it.”
That they didn’t fully embrace it is partly because “Assassins” – in any year – always will be a show that deliberately knocks audiences off-balance. “We absolutely set out to upset audiences in a way that was necessary to open them to what the show is about,” Weidman said.
“The show really asks a lot of the audience,” he added. “It asks them to listen and to suspend judgments and predispositions. But it never asks anybody to sympathize with these characters. They are murderers, and vicious ones, for the most part. What Sam Byck did at the airport is horrific. (In 1974, the would-be Nixon assassin killed a guard, forced his way onto an airliner and killed a co-pilot in his failed plot to fly the plane into the White House. Byck committed suicide before the plane took off.)
“But I think it is very useful for any audience to hear what these people have to say.”
What can still shock us?
Twenty-four years have passed since Hinckley shot Reagan, the last known serious attempt on a president’s life. But Americans now living with the daily threat of domestic terrorism seem shockproof. Given the climate of world politics and the rhetoric generated by America’s enemies, the idea of a possible presidential assassination today might seem less surprising than at any time in our history.
“I would agree, but not because of who the president is right now or because the country is at war,” Weidman said. “God knows Bill Clinton stirred up as much venomous hatred as George Bush does now. I would agree because of this new and deeply unsettled sense that somehow we are now all potential victims of violence.”
It is that steeled reality that might make Next Stage audiences as open to “Assassins” as any might ever be.
“I hope the audiences will sit there and let it in,” Weidman said. “If they do, I think they will have the best kind of experience you can have in a theater, which is one that really means something and causes you to think about things in a different way.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
