ASSASSINS

By JENNA SCHERER

del.ico.us | digg it! | reddit!

print | email | 0 Comments

In an election year, it's all too easy to get caught up in the American monolith. 'Tis the season to bust out the billowing flag and use the butt of the pole to cram the inconvenient freaks into a corner.

It's why Company One couldn't have chosen a juicier time to unpack Assassins, Stephen Sondheim's sinister grin of a musical. It tackles that most unglamorous, uncomfortable of subjects—the murderers and would-be murderers of US presidents. Not exactly yer typical song-and-dance fodder; but this is Sondheim we're talking about, the man who's put beautiful music into the mouths of strippers, big bad wolves and demon barbers alike.

This production is the edgy-and-they-mean-it troupe's first stab at musical theater, and they nail it. Director Shawn LaCount vividly renders Assassins' ooky American underworld in the tight confines of the BCA Plaza Theatre. Set designer Anthony R. Phelps litters the stage with literal soapboxes, from which history's sundry outcasts and maniacs spout their half-cocked credos.

Assassins brings together two centuries' worth of lone gunmen, nine in all, at a metaphysical shooting gallery. Everyone is here, from the infamous (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald) to the nearly forgotten (Giuseppe Zangara, Sara Jane Moore). Along with librettist John Weidman, Sondheim takes us through each assassin's rageful moment in the sun, with the narrative aid of an everyman balladeer (Nik Walker).

Unlike those of so many Boston-area musicals, this cast can actually sing. Heck, they can even act. Assassins calls for bombast aplenty, and these cats deliver. Winning the insanity vote is Jeff Mahoney as Charles Guiteau, the weirdly charismatic murderer of President Garfield. David DaCosta is appropriately hammy as old-timey actor Booth, and Ed Hoopman brings a balance-maintaining gravitas to the McKinley-offin' Czolgosz. McCaela Donovan and Elizabeth Rimar keep things light(er) as the dual failed killers of Gerald Ford.

Time has little meaning in this world (the narrative skips from 1865 to 1981, and back to 1881), and neither does censorship. Here are mouths that would normally be muzzled, and with good reason. These guys are losers, psychopaths, bigots, sadists; but Assassins argues that these voices are as much a part of the national fabric as baseball, apple pie and watery yellow beer. "But in here, this is America too," Booth (DaCosta) tells Oswald (Jonathan Popp) as he lurks, sweaty and bereft, in the Texas School Book Depository.

Sondheim and Weidman offer us no lesson, no answers—just the battle cry of nine angry delinquents ("Another National Anthem") and the jarring ring of a bullet leaving its chamber.

ASSASSINS

UNTIL 8.9.08

AT THE BCA PLAZA THEATRE

WED-THU 7:30PM; FRI-SAT 8PM; SUN 2PM/$18-$38

617.933.8600

539 TREMONT ST., BOSTON

BOSTONTHEATRESCENE.COM

COMPANYONE.ORG