Assassins – Chichester Festival Theatre

Harry Hepple in Assassins at Chichester Festival Theatre. Picture: Johan Persson

Assassins continues at the Chichester Festival Theatre until 24 June 2023.

Star rating: five stars ★★★★★

All you have to do

Is move your little finger

Move your little finger

And you can change the world

This chilling first verse of ‘Gun Song’ was written by Stephen Sondheim 33 years ago for a musical history lesson unlike anything else he wrote but it’s every bit as relevant in the trigger-happy USA of today with its sickening record of regular mass shootings.

From failed actor John Wilkes Booth’s cold-blooded removal of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to the failed attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life by Jodie Foster fantasist John Hinckley in 1981, Sondheim picked nine of the 13 attacks on Presidents – four successful – to create a time-bending satire which shoots holes in the American Dream. You can understand why it took America a long time to warm to this masterpiece. It’s not a record to be proud of and who knows what the future holds as Donald Trump continues to do his worst to incite mob violence?

So a timely revival of Assassins (book by John Weidman) at lovely Chichester and a killingly-impressive one under director Polly Findlay’s colourful and contemporary reimagining, brought into the present via giant TV screens on either side of the stage showing the news of day and going back to the disturbing video of the JFK shooting in Dallas in 1963.

This device plus putting the names of the nefarious nine up in lights on a post of their own round the front of the stage is a great aide to those coming to Assassins for the first time and finding, as I once did, the concept baffling. Sondheim is not easy at the best of times and this one packs so much into its tight, never-flagging, no-interval 110 minutes.

From the get-go the audience is met with a hot dog stand, a riot of American flags, brash pop songs, a carnival shooting range and a fairground atmosphere not unlike what you would find at Disneyland… apart from the invitation to “come and kill a president”.

Then the main cast, planted in the packed auditorium, are called up to the stage by the Trump-clone Proprietor (Peter Forbes) and make their delusional intentions known. And what a sublime cast it is. From Charlotte Jaconelli’s gem of a cameo as political activist Emma Goldman to Nick Holder’s foul-mouthed, fantasy phone conversation with his ‘friend’ Leonard Bernstein as Samuel Byck, the nutcase who hijacked a 747 with a view to crashing it into the White House and wiping out President Richard Nixon, and the preening Charles Guiteau (Harry Hepple, outstanding) who thought he should be US ambassador to France and shot President Garfield for turning him down.

‘The Ballad of Guiteau’ with its insistently repetitive “I am Going to the Lordy” as he cakewalks to the gallows and puts the noose around his own neck is yet another fascinating tableau, along with the spectacular electrocution of penniless immigrant Giuseppe Zangara (Luke Brady) whose attempt at killing President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1933 ended with him mortally wounding the Mayor of Chicago instead.

And there’s more, much more. The scenes with Amy Booth-Steel as the bungling Sara Jane Moore and Carly Mercedes Dyer as Charles Manson disciple Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, both bent on taking out President Gerald Ford, are pure delight and often very funny, although dog lovers might not agree.

Danny Mac, a Strictly finalist who is well known for high-profile TV work and a variety of stage performances, continues to impress in more demanding roles. His John Wilkes Booth and the deep-voiced Sam Oladeinde’s Leon Czolgosz – it is Oladeinde who performs ‘Gun Song’ so compellingly – are spot on. Samuel Thomas as the reluctant killer Lee Harvey Oswald is a latecomer to the party but, egged on by the others to “move his little finger”, he assassinates Kennedy and realises his dream – to be front-page news and famous.

Sondheim’s valiant attempt at a 1970s Carpenters pop song, ‘Unworthy of Your Love’, is usually sung just by Hinckley, the troublingly obsessed pursuer of the underage movie star Jodie Foster (who was 12 when she made Taxi Driver), but here the song becomes a duet, and a highlight, between Hinckley (a convincing Jack Shalloo) and Fromme.

The action is spread over 126 years but Sondheim has created songs and rhythms to match each period – love ballads, spirituals, folk song, Sousa marches – but all come alike to musical director Jo Cichonska and her red-capped musicians.

If anything is lacking in Assassins, it’s the absence of exceptional songs once you get past the catchy ‘Everybody’s Got the Right’ – the ensemble number which top and tails the show – and the sweet but sinister ‘Unworthy of Your Love’, there’s not much else that you’d take home with you.

But the miracle of a set designed by Lizzie Clachan should be an award winner and as the song ‘Everybody’s Got the Right’ says: “No one can be put in jail for their dreams” (oh yeah?). Musical theatre doesn’t get much better than this.

Jeremy Chapman