Thursday, December 09, 2021
Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ lays bare bizarre role of guns in American culture
New Pittsburgh Courier: Long before the numbing regularity of school shootings, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and the current Supreme Court debate over whether to further relax gun laws, composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was sounding the alarm about the role of guns in American culture.
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This isn't really an article about the entertainment industry, or even about Sondheim. It is mostly just using Assassins as a touch stone to talk about Americans' relationship with guns. It's a pretty good starting place though, Sondheim definitely threw some unsettling things into this show. I have not seen it all the way through, but it is interesting that he connects the assassins not just through ideology or the actual act of assassination that defines them, but through their guns and their relationship and ideas with and about those weapons.
I wonder how the recent re-evaluation of stage guns will affect this show. The publicity that accompanied the Alec Baldwin shooting definitely seems to have been a wake up call about the use of weapons for a lot of people in the industry, and this show, for obvious reasons, is pretty dependent on guns. I hope they're following best practices.
I worked on a production of Assassins in college as the master electrician and I did not think it was a very good musical. I personally have never been impressed with Sondheim’s work. I could not figure out what he was trying to say with Assassins. It definitely centers the villains of our history as protagonists and I didn’t understand what he was trying to do. My biggest issue with the show was at the end when there are theoretical future assassins calling out lines. I don’t know what the stage directions are in the book, but in our production we had these characters come in from the house doors at the back of the house and call out their one liners in the dark. For me, I got the sense that this moment was an attempt at conveying how “the assassin” was a permanent fixture of US culture and history and there would always be people attempting to kill our president. The thing is, with the music and the way the story centers these assassins it almost felt like Sondheim was celebrating this aspect of US culture, not critiquing it like how this article seems to believe.
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