Assassins
September 17-October 3, 2010

Dramaturgy by Ross Harmon
Cast | Fascinating Assassins... | The Authors: Sondheim and Weidman... | The Assassins and their Assistants...

FASCINATING ASSASSINS...

Assassins is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by John Weidman, based on an idea by Charles Gilbert, Jr. It uses the premise of a murderous carnival game to produce a revue-style portrayal of men and women who attempt (successfully or otherwise) to assassinate Presidents of the United States. The music varies to reflect the popular music of the eras depicted.

The musical first opened Off-Broadway in 1990, and the 2004 Broadway production won five 2004 Tony Awards.

As a panelist at producer Stuart Ostrow's Musical Theater Lab, Sondheim read a script by playwright Charles Gilbert. Sondheim asked Gilbert for permission to use his idea. Gilbert consented and offered to write the book; but Sondheim declined, having already had collaborator John Weidman in mind. Weldman had written the book for Pacific Overtures and would work with Sondheim again on Bounce / Road Show.

Assassins opened off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on December 18, 1990, with 73 performances under Jerry Zaks' direction. The cast included Victor Garber, Terrence Mann, Patrick Cassidy, Debra Monk, Greg Germann, and Annie Golden. The run sold out. Frank Rich, a long-time fan of Sondheim, said "Assassins will have to fire with sharper aim and fewer blanks if it is to shoot to kill."

On October 29, 1992, Assassins opened in London at the Donmar Warehouse with a cast that included Henry Goodman as Charles Guiteau and Louise Gold as Sara Jane Moore. The show ran for 76 performances, closing on January 9, 1993.

Roundabout Theater Company's Broadway production, directed by Joe Mantello, was originally scheduled for 2001 but was postponed to April 22, 2004, because the content was sensitive in light of the events on September 11, 2001. After 101 performances at Studio 54, Assassins closed on July 18, 2004. Neil Patrick Harris starred in the roles of The Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald, with Marc Kudisch in an extended role as The Proprietor. Michael Cerveris played John Wilkes Booth, for which he received a Tony Award. The 2004 production was noted for a coup de théâtre: the Zapruder film of the death of John F. Kennedy projected onto Lee Harvey Oswald's t-shirt.

The Los Angeles premiere opened in 1994 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and included Patrick Cassidy (the original Balladeer) playing Booth. The three versions (original, London and Broadway) were not identical, as roles were combined, and the song "Something Just Broke" was new to the London production. In 1991, Theatre Communications Group published the libretto, which did not feature "Something Just Broke".

ASSASSINS: THE AUTHORS...

Stephen Joshua Sondheim (born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards (eight, more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has been described as "the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theatre." His most famous scores include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Assassins, as well as the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. He was president of the Dramatists Guild from 1973 to 1981.

Sondheim’s father was a successful dress manufacturer, and his mother, Janet Fox, a fashion designer. Young Stephen was given piano lessons from an early age, and showed a distinct aptitude for music, puzzles and mathematics. His parents divorced when he was only ten, and Stephen was taken by his mother to live on a farm in Pennsylvania. The area had attracted a number of well-known personalities from the New York theater world; a close neighbor was the playwright, lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who had a son Stephen's age. Stephen Sondheim and Jimmy Hammerstein soon became friends, and Stephen came to see the older Hammerstein as a role model. At the time, Hammerstein was inaugurating his historic collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers. When Sondheim was in his teens, Rodgers and Hammerstein were enjoying unprecedented success with the shows Oklahoma! and South Pacific. Sondheim resolved that, like Hammerstein, he too would write for the theater.

Sondheim studied piano seriously through his prep school years, while Hammerstein tutored him in writing for the theater. With Hammerstein's guidance, he wrote scripts and scores for four shows, a project that occupied Sondheim through his student years at Williams College. On graduation, he was awarded a two-year scholarship to study composition. He studied with the avant-garde composer Milton Babbit, writing a piano concerto and a violin sonata while trying to break into the theater. Sondheim's first efforts at securing a Broadway assignment fell through, but he found work writing for television, and made the acquaintance of two playwrights who were to play a significant role in his career: Arthur Laurents and Burt Shevelove.

Although Sondheim aspired to write both words and music, his first Broadway assignments called on him to write either one or the other. At age 25 he was hired to write lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's music in the landmark musical West Side Story. Before West Side Story opened, he made his Broadway debut as a composer, with incidental music to N. Richard Nash's play, The Girls of Summer. He then won a second lyric-writing assignment for the Broadway musical Gypsy. Both shows had scripts by Arthur Laurents and were directed by Jerome Robbins.

The credit, "Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim" finally appeared on Broadway for the first time in 1962. The show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, was an unqualified success, and introduced the first of Sondheim's tunes to become a show business standard, "Comedy Tonight." The script for Forum was cowritten by Sondheim's friend, Burt Shevelove. Sondheim then collaborated with Arthur Laurents again on Anyone Can Whistle (1964).

Sondheim returned to the role of lyricist-for-hire one more time to collaborate with Hammerstein's old partner Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965. From then on, he would insist on writing both music and lyrics, although nearly five years would elapse before a new Sondheim musical opened on Broadway. Royalties from West Side Story, Gypsy and Forum, all of which were made into motion pictures, freed him to develop projects of his choosing. In the meantime, he published a remarkable series of word puzzles in New York Magazine. Many critics have related his love of puzzles and word games to the dazzling word play of his lyrics, with their intricate rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, puns and wide-ranging allusions.

Sondheim made a historic breakthrough as both composer and lyricist with Company (1971), a caustic look at love and marriage in contemporary New York City. The show marked a sharp break with Broadway's past, and established Sondheim as the most inventive and daring composer working in the musical theater. Company was Sondheim's first collaboration with director Harold Prince, who had produced both West Side Story and Forum. Sondheim's second collaboration with Prince as director, Follies, paid masterful tribute to the song styles of Broadway's past, while deploying them to ironic effect in a poignant commentary on the disappointment of middle age. His next production, A Little Night Music, charmed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, while its signature song, "Send in the Clowns," became an unexpected pop standard.

Sondheim received Tony Awards for the music and lyrics of all three of these shows. The following year, the winning composer thanked Sondheim, "for not writing a show this year." Sondheim did find time in 1974 to write a show for a performance in the Yale University swimming pool, an adaptation of the classical Greek comedy The Frogs, with a script by his old friend Burt Shevelove. From 1973 to 1981, Sondheim served as President of the Dramatists Guild, the professional association of playwrights, theatrical composers and lyricists.

Never content to continue along comfortable or familiar lines, Sondheim and Harold Prince explored further new territory with Pacific Overtures (1976), an imaginative account of relations between Japan and the United States, from the 1850s to the present. Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), adapted an early Victorian melodrama into a combination of gothic horror, bitter satire and Sondheim's most complex score yet. Sweeney Todd enjoyed a healthy run and brought Sondheim another Tony Award. While a number of Sondheim's shows have enjoyed successful revivals in the commercial theater, Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music have found a second home in the opera houses of the world, where classical standards of musicianship can do justice to their soaring scores.

Sweeney Todd marked the climax of Sondheim's long collaboration with Harold Prince. Merrily We Roll Along (1981), adapted from a bittersweet Kaufman and Hart drama of the 1930s, was the last of their shows together. Although Sondheim and Prince remained close friends, they sought renewed inspiration in collaboration with others. Sondheim then embarked on a partnership with playwright and director James Lapine.

The first fruit of their collaboration was Sunday in the Park With George (1984), a work inspired by Georges Seurat's pointillist painting, "Sunday Afternoon On the Isle of the Grande Jatte." The play intertwines the story of Seurat and his mistress with that of a contemporary painter and his lover. Sunday in the Park With George was a solid success, and brought Sondheim and Lapine the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a rare instance of the Pulitzer committee honoring a musical play. Into the Woods (1987), another collaboration with Lapine, sought the meaning inside some of the most familiar childhood fairly tales, and has been produced successfully all over the United States.

One of Sondheim's most disturbing productions was Assassins (1990), an examination of the motives and delusions of the men who murdered American presidents. Passion (1994), another collaboration with James Lapine, took a dark, intimate story of unrequited love and set it to music of heartrending poignancy. As the Broadway theater has turned to more predictable fare, Sondheim and his collaborators have sought out new venues for his increasingly daring work. Bounce / Road Show, recounting the follies of the 1920s Florida land boom, opened in Chicago and Washington in 2003. Its script, like that of Pacific Overtures and Assassins, was written by the playwright John Weidman.

In 2008, the American Theatre Wing presented Sondheim with a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. At the time, two of his shows, Gypsy and Sunday in the Park With George, were enjoying successful revivals on Broadway.

Over the last 50 years, Sondheim has set an unsurpassed standard of brilliance and artistic integrity in the musical theater. His music, steeped in the history of the American stage, is also deeply informed by the classical tradition and the advances of modern concert music. His words, unequalled in their wit and virtuosity, have recorded a lifetime of profound, unblinking insight into the joys and sorrows of life and love.

John Weidman (born September 25, 1946) is an American librettist. He has written the books for a wide variety of stage musicals, three in collaboration with Stephen Sondheim: Pacific Overtures, Assassins, and Road Show. In 1999 he co-created the Tony Award winning musical Contact with choreographer/director Susan Stroman. He has been nominated for the Tony Award for Best Book for a Musical three times.

Since 1986, Weidman has been a writer for Sesame Street, for which he has won more than a dozen Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing for a Children's Program. From 1999 to 2009 he was president of the Dramatists Guild of America. Weidman received a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

THE ASSASSINS AND THEIR ASSISTANTS:

Leon Czolgosz (May 5, 1873 – October 29, 1901) was the assassin of U.S. President William McKinley. In the last few years of his life, he claimed to have been heavily influenced by anarchists such as Emma Goldman. On August 31, 1901, Czolgosz moved to Buffalo, New York. There, he rented a room near the site of the Pan-American Exposition. On September 6 he went to the exposition with a .32 caliber revolver. With the gun wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket, Czolgosz shot McKinley in the abdomen twice at point blank range. Members of the crowd immediately subdued him, and beat him so severely it was initially thought he might not live to stand trial. Czolgosz was tried and convicted on September 24 after the jury deliberated for only one hour. They recommended the death penalty. Czolgosz was electrocuted by three jolts of 1800 volts each, in Auburn Prison on October 29, 1901.

John Hinckley (born May 29, 1955) attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1981, as the culmination of an effort to impress actress Jodie Foster. Hinckley did not directly hit Reagan, but seriously wounded him when a bullet ricocheted off the side of the presidential limousine and hit him in the chest. Hinckley did not attempt to flee and was arrested at the scene. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and has remained under institutional psychiatric care since then. Public outcry over the verdict led to the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984.

Charles Julius Guiteau (September 8, 1841 – June 30, 1882) was an American lawyer who assassinated U.S. President James A. Garfield on July 2, 1881. A fervent Garfield supporter, Guiteau vowed revenge when denied an ambassadorship. On July 2, 1881, he lay in wait for the president at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, getting his shoes shined, pacing, and engaging a cab to take him to the jail later. As President Garfield entered the station, Guiteau stepped forward and shot Garfield twice in the back. After a long, painful battle with infections possibly brought on by unsterilized surgical instruments, Garfield died on September 19, eleven weeks after being shot. Guiteau was tried and executed by hanging.

Giuseppe Zangara (September 7, 1900 – March 20, 1933) was the assassin of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, though United States President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt is believed to have been his intended target. On February 15, 1933, Roosevelt was giving an impromptu speech in Miami, Florida. Zangara joined the crowd, armed with a .32-caliber pistol he had bought at a local pawnshop. However, being only five feet tall, he had to stand on a wobbly folding chair to get a clear aim at his target. After the first shot he fired four more shots wildly. He missed the president-elect, but five other people were hit, including Cermak, who was standing next to Roosevelt. Captured and convicted, on March 20, 1933 Zangara was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Penitentiary. His final statement was "Viva Italia! Goodbye to all poor peoples everywhere! Push the button!"

Samuel Joseph Byck (January 30, 1930 – February 22, 1974) was an unemployed former tire salesman who attempted to hijack a plane flying out of Baltimore-Washington International Airport. He intended to crash into the White House in hopes of killing U.S. President Richard Nixon. Since Byck was already known to authorities, he stole a .22 caliber revolver from a friend of his to use in the hijacking. He also made a bomb out of 2-gallon jugs of gasoline and an igniter. On February 22, 1974, Byck drove to the Airport, killed a police officer, and stormed the plane. He then shot both pilots and told a flight attendant to close the door or he would blow up the plane. After a standoff, a police officer rushed into the plane and fired four shots through the aircraft door at Byck. Before the police could gain entry to the aircraft, he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The plane never left the gate, and Nixon's schedule was not affected by the assassination attempt.

Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme (born October 22, 1948) is a former member of the Charles Manson Family Cult. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. On the morning of September 5, 1975, Fromme went to Sacramento's Capitol Park, reportedly to plead with President Gerald Ford about the plight of the California redwoods, dressed in a nun-like robe and armed with a Colt .45 pistol that she later pointed at Ford. She was immediately restrained and handcuffed. After a lengthy trial she was convicted of the attempted assassination of the president. "I stood up and waved a gun (at Ford) for a reason," said Fromme. "I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life, but clean air, healthy water and respect for creatures and creation." After serving 34 years in custody, she was released from prison on August 14, 2009.

Sara Jane Moore (born on February 15, 1930) attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford on September 22, 1975 in San Francisco, just seventeen days after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme had pointed a gun at the president. She had been picked up by police on an illegal handgun charge the day before the Ford incident, but was released from arrest. Moore was about 40 feet away from President Ford when she fired a single shot at him. At trial, Moore pleaded guilty to attempted assassination and was sentenced to life in prison. In 2007 at the age of 77, Moore was released from prison on parole. Moore has stated that she regrets the assassination attempt, saying she was "blinded by her radical political views." When asked about her crime in an interview, Moore stated, "I am very glad I did not succeed. I know now that I was wrong to try."

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838– April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family and by the 1860s, was a well known actor. He was also a Confederate sympathizer and strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States. Booth and a group of co-conspirators planned to kill Lincoln in a bid to help the Confederacy's cause. Of the conspirators, only Booth was completely successful in carrying out his part of the plot. Lincoln died the next morning from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Following the shooting, Booth fled on horseback to southern Maryland. He eventually made his way to a farm in rural northern Virginia; he was tracked down and shot by Union soldiers 12 days later.

Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was the assassin of President John F. Kennedy who was fatally shot in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. A former U.S. Marine who had briefly defected to the Soviet Union, Oswald was initially arrested in the death of a police officer who had been shot shortly after Kennedy was killed. Soon suspected in the death of Kennedy as well, Oswald denied involvement in either killing. Two days later, Oswald was being led through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters prior to his transfer to the county jail when Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby stepped from the crowd and shot Oswald in the abdomen. Oswald later died in the same hospital where Kennedy had died two days earlier. Ruby later said he had been distraught over Kennedy's death, though other motives have been hypothesized.

David Edgar Herold (June 16, 1842 – July 7, 1865) conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. After leading fellow conspirator Lewis Powell to the home of Secretary of State William H. Seward, whom Powell intended to kill, Herold escaped. Herold assisted Booth and continued with him in his escape through Maryland and into Virginia until the authorities found them. Booth was shot and killed and Herold was apprehended. He was tried before a military tribunal. Having already admitted his involvement in the assassination conspiracy, his defense was that he was feeble-minded and under undue influence from Booth. He was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out the day after it was imposed, on July 7, 1865.

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Lithuania, Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement. She became a writer and a lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed. In 1917, Goldman was sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After her release from prison, she was deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to their use of violence and repression. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. She died, exiled in Toronto on May 14, 1940.

Assassins Dramaturgy © 2010
Edited by Ross Harmon: The Barn Players

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