Word: sondheimer
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Before his musical Assassins makes its long-awaited Broadway debut next week, Stephen Sondheim has one piece of friendly advice for New York City theatergoers. Leave town...
This is not a knock on a show that has been the unwanted child in a brood of Sondheim hits that stretch from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to Into the Woods. No, he's raising the alert level for good, practical reasons. Back in 1991, just before Assassins opened off-Broadway, the first Gulf War broke out. The patriotic climate was not ripe for a musical that showcased nine killers and would-be killers of U.S. Presidents; the show got mixed reviews and never moved to Broadway. A decade later a new, Broadway version...
...some critics, what Sondheim and book writer John Weidman put onstage in 1991 was disaster enough. A carnival barker, under neon signs blaring HIT THE PREZ! WIN A PRIZE!, opens the show by luring in a parade of customers like John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley and Charles Guiteau, the "disappointed office seeker" who shot President James A. Garfield. Hinckley and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme--wannabe assassins of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, respectively--sing a duet about unrequited love, in their cases for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. One musical number ends in an electrocution, another in a hanging. Samuel Byck...
...Sondheim, 74, was padding around his ritzy Manhattan town house (Katharine Hepburn used to live next door) on a recent weekday afternoon, looking a bit scruffy in an oversize T shirt but talking animatedly about the show that he was always surprised got such a "virulent" negative reaction. The most celebrated Broadway composer of the past 30 years hasn't had a new show on Broadway in 10--since Passion, which ran for eight months in 1994. The days when Sondheim shows like Company and Follies seemed to be opening doors for musical theater are long gone. After years...
...germ of the show was planted in Sondheim's head back in the 1970s when he was judging scripts at a workshop for new musicals and came upon one called Assassins. It was a different, Manchurian Candidate--like story about a war veteran hired to assassinate a President, but Sondheim remembered it years later when he was discussing ideas with Weidman, his collaborator on Pacific Overtures. Their first thought was to create a musical about assassinations through history, starting with Julius Caesar. They eventually narrowed it to assassins of U.S. Presidents--each of whom gets a moment in the spotlight...