The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center’s season-opening “Assassins” should reassure anyone that new producing artistic director Scott RC Levy will not shy from controversial and potentially disturbing musical titles. You know, the best kind.
“Assassins,” with music by Stephen Sondheim, is one of those big-scale, professional productions fans have come to expect from the Fine Arts Center. The signature work of scenic designer Christopher Sheley, musical director Roberta Jacyshyn and a fine ensemble of actors — including Denver’s Jordan Leigh — all reinforce why this is one of the best places in the state to see big Broadway musicals.
But “Assassins” is no “Sweeney Todd,” one of the company’s crowning achievements from last year. It’s a disjointed and intentionally distancing exercise, this surreal gathering of nine real and would-be presidential assassins from U.S. history.
And it turns out the majestic, 400-seat SaGaJi Theatre isn’t as ideal a place to stage this story as, say, the 60-seat college lab theater in Greeley that pulled it off last year with far fewer dollars, but greater emotional impact.
Size works against the Fine Arts Center. We’re already separated from the actors by the orchestra pit. And while Sheley’s multilevel, train-depot set design is an architectural wonder, it too often puts what’s happening on stage physically as far back, up and away from us as can be.
At its best, “Assassins” plays out like an in-your-face, carnival freak show. Get too close, and it’ll smack you. But this great-looking and-sounding production never gets close enough to us to deliver the knockout punch.
That said, “Assassins” is theatrical food for thought. It explores the possible similarities in background, motives and economic class between, say, bad actor John Wilkes Booth (who took aim at Lincoln), tire salesman Samuel Byck (Nixon) and Manson family hippie Squeaky Fromme (Ford). What is perhaps most disturbing is the lack of commonalties it finds among killers — just degrees of delusion, grandeur and political displacement; a shared notion that the American dream was a sham; and, in most cases, vast reservoirs of anger.
And some were just nut jobs trying to impress Jodie Foster.
“Assassins” subverts the all-American notion that anyone can make it here, to suggest instead that anyone can become immortal (historically speaking) with the simple twitch of a trigger finger.
The musical is not meant to be taken seriously as a historical document — it presents Fromme (Cailin Doran) and wacko housewife Sara Jane Moore (Miriam Roth Ballard) as silly gal pals out to get Gerald Ford. It’s filled with absurdly comic moments, like a bumbling Moore tossing bullets at Ford.
But this interpretation lacks the meaningful menace that must go along with it. At Thursday’s final preview performance, Levy’s shooters were still struggling to find their attitudinal aim.
While some approach their duties with supreme sincerity — Brantley Scott Haines singing “Unworthy of Your Love” to a photo of Jodie Foster is by far the most real moment of the night — far too many characters are played strictly for laughs. That makes the climactic scene unintentionally absurd — when these merry wacksters show up at the Dallas School Book Depository to urge on Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald is well-played by Marco Robinson, who, in one of the show’s most subversive twists, transitions from a likable if nebulously defined narrator (a Will Rogers-like embodiment of the American dream) into perhaps the most notorious killer in U.S. history.
Or is he? Somehow “Assassins,” written in 1990, seems to have lost some of its gunpowder since the Sept. 11 attacks, because that small band of terrorists who killed 3,000 people have pretty much relegated all these freaks and geeks to second-class killers.
Because it is played too long and too much for laughs, this “Assassins” comes off less like a treatise on American narcissism and more a snapshot of the criminally insane.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Assassins” **1/2 (out of four stars)
Presented by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St. Written by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman. Through Oct. 23. 2 hours, 15 minutes. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. $27-$37 (students $15). 719-634-5583 or . Note: Adult situations, violence.
