Assassins – Watermill Theatre, Bagnor

Picture: The Other Richard

Assassins continues at the Watermill Theatre, Bagnor until 26 October 2019.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Every time I see Assassins, I like it more and more and this darkly comic Watermill revival of the controversial Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman take on the American dream that “every now and then goes a little wrong” is a truly thrilling piece of theatre.

Directed with flair and pace by Bill Buckhurst whose acclaimed pie-shop Sweeney Todd went from Tooting to Shaftesbury Avenue to Broadway, and performed by an outstanding team of actor-musicians, this 1990 Sondheim, from Weidman’s brilliant book, zips along for 100 glorious minutes without the interruption of an interval.

Thanks to America’s gun-happy society, four American presidents, Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F Kennedy in 1963, were assassinated in office, and two, Theodore Roosevelt (1912) and Ronald Reagan (1981), injured in assassination attempts.

Three more would-be slayers of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who didn’t get that far because of incompetence are interwoven into this daring and still startlingly relevant piece of American history.

This punchy satire on America’s gun culture must have made uncomfortable viewing for its initial Off-Broadway audience when launched in 1990. It ran for only 73 performances and attempts to revive it on Broadway in 2001 had to put back to 2004 because of the horrors of 9/11.

London didn’t particularly warm to it either when Sam Mendes brought it to the Donmar in 1992 but Assassins, with its stunning concept of bringing all the miscreants into the same time zone and feeding off each other’s political madness, fared much better at the Menier in 2014 in Jamie Lloyd’s disturbing and much-praised production.

No wonder that many Americans did not see the funny side of this vaudevillian revue-style portrayal of deranged killers like John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Sondheim’s skill in marrying the styles of the music to the different time slots from the 1860s to the 1980s is sublime as we go from banjo-plucking country to the gospel of ‘I am Going to the Lordy’ and the Carpenters-prettiness of ‘Unworthy of Your Love’.

And what dream roles he gives the actors. Eddie Elliott’s showstopping, all-action turn as the delusional Guiteau as he prepares for the gallows after shooting President Garfield for not making him Ambassador to France is electric.

Steve Simmonds makes a superb Samuel Byck in his tatty Santa Claus outfit madly exhorting Leonard Bernstein to compose more love songs like ‘Tonight’ to make America a better place. His plan to hijack a 747 to crash into the White House and exterminate Tricky Dicky Nixon inevitably fails but Simmonds’ spot-on, ranting interpretation doesn’t.

The tragi-comic interplay by Evelyn Hoskins as Charles Manson-crazed Squeaky Fromme and Sara Poyser as Sara Jane Moore, the two women who independently botch knocking off President Ford in 1975, is a joy to watch and genuinely funny.

As would-be Reagan slayer, creepy Jack Quarton’s duet with Hoskins on ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ is made all the more sinister by the fact that film starlet Jodie Foster, the object of his obsession, was only 13 when he fell in lust with her in Taxi Driver.

He hoped to get Foster’s attention by wiping out Reagan but wounded his target and was only released from a psychiatric hospital three years ago.

Unusually, we have a female Balladeer in Lillie Flynn (and why not?) who suggests in ‘The Ballad of Booth’ that Lincoln’s actor-assassin, perfectly sung by Alex Mugnaioni, might have been driven to the deadly deed by unfavourable reviews.

Pianist Zheng Xi Yong, who plays Giuseppe Zangara, a penniless Italian immigrant who tried to shoot president-elect Roosevelt in 1933 but missed and killed the Mayor of Chicago instead, catches this pitiful loser well as does Peter Dukes with Czolgosz, the Polish anarchist electrocuted for taking out McKinley in the belief it was his duty as governments are the enemy of the poor.

Ned Rudkins-Stow’s Oswald, Joey Hickman’s Proprietor and Phoebe Fildes’ activist Emma Goldman are solid in the other name parts, with Matthew James Hinchliffe, Grace Lancaster and Simon Oskarsson making up a well-rehearsed team of 15 who tackle Sondheim’s tricks with gusto.

How they all get on the tiny Watermill stage, along with their bulky instruments, is a puzzle choreographer Georgina Lamb and director Buckhurst have somehow solved and full credit to all concerned.

Not a Sondheim overloaded with memorable songs like Follies but ‘The Ballad of Guiteau’ (better known as ‘I am Going to the Lordy’), ‘Unworthy of your Love’, ‘The Ballad of Booth’ and ‘Everybody’s Got the Right (to be happy)’ which starts the show rolling in its fairground cavalcade setting – “C’mon and Shoot a President, You  Can Win A Prize!” – a fine creation by designer Simon Kenny, are rich and out of the top drawer.

In an otherwise excellent programme, the absence of a song list and who sang them is irritating but The Watermill is not the only theatre guilty of omitting what is a must for any musical.

This twisted celebration of the American Dream as “a land where any boy can grow up to kill a President” – and it is a young lad pointing a gun at the audience which is the show’s closing image – is also a celebration of what great theatre is about. Warmly recommended.

Jeremy Chapman