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Assassins
Assassins. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Performed by Shotgun Players.
I woke up this morning and I thought, "It's Thursday. [counts on fingers] That means there's only six more days including today until the election will be over! Over!"
I went to see this musical last week with some friends, and it was both just what I needed and even more timely than I expected it to be. The assassins are the dark underside of the American dream (or so the director's notes tell us), which I actually agree with, and after Occupy, it's impossible to hear their woes with quite the same equanimity one might have felt before. They're still deluded and lost, of course, but most of them are right that maybe it's not entirely their fault.
The staging was really clever, and I especially liked that this production did away with the extras and had the other assassins play the nameless cast of everyday Americans throughout history who are bystanders to these events: of course their audience is each other, and of course the other assassins are just everyone's fellow citizens. John Wilkes Booth is the exception to this, of course, and I thought the musical did a less skilled job with him than with the others…until Lee Harvey Oswald showed up in the last act and blew the roof off the whole thing. In this production, doubling the roles leant Oswald's emergence onto the stage an extra (and strong) charge of inevitable horror.
All in all, another excellent production from Shotgun.
I woke up this morning and I thought, "It's Thursday. [counts on fingers] That means there's only six more days including today until the election will be over! Over!"
I went to see this musical last week with some friends, and it was both just what I needed and even more timely than I expected it to be. The assassins are the dark underside of the American dream (or so the director's notes tell us), which I actually agree with, and after Occupy, it's impossible to hear their woes with quite the same equanimity one might have felt before. They're still deluded and lost, of course, but most of them are right that maybe it's not entirely their fault.
The staging was really clever, and I especially liked that this production did away with the extras and had the other assassins play the nameless cast of everyday Americans throughout history who are bystanders to these events: of course their audience is each other, and of course the other assassins are just everyone's fellow citizens. John Wilkes Booth is the exception to this, of course, and I thought the musical did a less skilled job with him than with the others…until Lee Harvey Oswald showed up in the last act and blew the roof off the whole thing. In this production, doubling the roles leant Oswald's emergence onto the stage an extra (and strong) charge of inevitable horror.
All in all, another excellent production from Shotgun.
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The tix are, I think, $23 each? We had a two-for-one coupon so we paid slightly less. I would totally recommend going.
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I've never seen a production of this musical (the first time I saw it was in 1993, a rare amazing local production), and it's *never* not been eerily appropriate. hands-down one of my favorite musicals of all time.
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