Stephen Sondheim’s collaboration with John Weidman that delves into the motivations and personalities of everyone who attempted to kill an American president, Assassins opened Off-Broadway in 1990 to mixed reviews but an undercurrent of passionate, devoted, you might say rabid, fans. The wider theater community largely caught up with the 2004 Broadway mounting.
As one of those rabid fans, I’ve seen three very good productions of Assassins here in town: Warehouse, Red Herring and Short North Stage (I was too young for the storied Players Theatre version), but it’s been a long four years since the most recent, and Imagine Productions’ version is shaping up to be something special.
I visited director Brandon Boring – whose work first hit my radar on another Sondheim, a gorgeous production of Into The Woods – and a couple of his actors, Ryan Metzger, who plays John Wilkes Booth, and Nancy Skaggs who knocked me sideways earlier in the year with Gallery’s Sondheim on Sondheim, during rehearsal, to get their thoughts on the play and production. Even though my travel schedule precluded a review for this outlet, I knew I wanted to write about this Assassins.
Everyone I spoke to was effusive about the cast and rehearsal process, mid-way through. On casting, Boring said, “I think the standard is you get tons of women in [Community theater] but you’re pulling teeth trying to get enough men out for the show. But there are so many great roles in this [that] after auditions, I would [have] three versions of the cast list. I had so many people that we turned down that could have been just as good as leads. [We ended up with] a good mix of people I’ve worked with before, people I’ve seen before but I’ve never worked with, and then some people [where] it’s their first show in town.”
Boring told me Assassins was what made him want to direct theater.
“I worked at the library in college, and I would just listen to cast albums,” he said. “One day, I was listening to Assassins for the first time, and I just started picturing the show in my head. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m staging a show in my head. I wonder if I could do that in real life.‘”
Metzger also had his first exposure to the show in college.
“I stage-managed a production of Assassins in college,” he explained. “At that point, I had not done a lot of musical theater. I did a lot of Shakespeare, a lot of ‘straight drama.’ And that show smacked me in the face. Booth, especially, with his arc, and his mechanics, was really chewy as an actor, and I’ve chased that role for 25 years.”
On the smooth – especially for such complex material – rehearsal process, Boring said, “I told [the cast] last week we could bring an audience in now, and they’d be impressed even with no lights and costumes.”
Metzger commented, “We’re all coming into this as seasoned, strong people who’ve already done their homework. There hasn’t been a lot of learning; we’re more exploring and digging deeper and finding those idiosyncrasies.”
Skaggs concurred.
“We had significant chunks [of rehearsal] where someone was missing, and that’s community theater – life intervenes,” she said. “But everyone’s really committed, and it’s super well cast.”
Skaggs had prior experience in the show – part of the ensemble in Red Herring’s version, one of my top ten shows of that year and a production I still talk about – but she always had her sights on would-be Gerald Ford assassin Sarah Jane Moore.
“The last show was nine years ago,” she said, “But it hits so much differently now. Every day, another school shooting..things that used to just occupy the national psyche in a way that you couldn’t get away from [and now we’re on to the next thing]. So the overwhelming cultural significance of a single moment like that? I wonder if it will ever happen again. Not that that’s something that I want to happen. But everything is so diluted because we’re just bombarded with terrible things, and I wonder how that will land with people now. Even awareness of the impact of Kennedy’s death. There will be people coming to the show that might not know what we’re talking about.”
Boring made excellent use of the time between when he first envisioned staging the play to now, honing his skills and refining his original vision of reorienting the timeless place where the assassins meet from a dilapidated carnival into a courtroom.
“I’m glad Assassins wasn’t my first show,” he said, “I cut my teeth on some other material. [As I’ve learned,] I found ways that concept enhances things.
“[But] if the concept gets in the way of the material? Don’t worry about the concept. It’s a question of doing the material honor and making sure the strictest execution of that concept can work. As a younger director, I would have been like, ‘No, I have this really cool idea, and we’ve got to do this.’ I’m like, ‘No. It’s the material.’ And if the idea helps the material, which it does in a lot of places, [great]. There are a lot of really fun moments of: This is just exactly what I thought it’d be. And sometimes it’s even better than I could have imagined.”
Doing Assassins in a year of elections wasn’t lost on Boring and Imagine when they initially looked at mounting the show in 2020, nor this year. Though as Metzger referred to, “In this volatile society that we’ve had for, oh, I don’t know, the last hundred or more years.”
Neither was the fact that they’re finally staging it in the same year when Sondheim left this earth. Boring’s devotion to the master is literally written on his body, his one tattoo is a lyric from Into the Woods.
“He redefined sort of what musical theater could be,” Boring said. “I was like, ‘Oh, theater can be so much more than just having fun with my friends. You can tell important human stories, and it’s so much bigger than I thought it could be.’ I feel like a lot of people feel that about this material. I love flashy, fun popcorn shows. We all love them. But [his shows] speak to something true. People singing the music [together], it’s very difficult music, but there’s something about that: it pushes you to be better. It pushes you to be more, and I like to think that’s a perfect metaphor for what a show is, do they push you to be better?”
Skaggs said, “I’ll always choose a Sondheim show if it’s offered. That’s the best type of show: you want to feel up to it. You want to feel worthy of being in a show that’s the best. If I’m capable of performing well on his shows, i feel good about myself as a performer. I’ve been in six or seven over the years, this one and Merrily We Roll Along twice. I’d love to be still able to do more.”
“When you see a Sondheim show coming up for auditions,” Skaggs chucked, singing a line from the show, “Everybody pays attention. You want to be part of it because, you know, the good people are going to show up. It’s going to be a great show, typically, because it’s going to attract the kind of people that are interested.”
Metzger said his priest will be coming to the show, along with his wife, and advised, “Leave your expectations and your children at the door. This is definitely a babysitter show. Come with an open mind and leave with an even more open mind.”
Boring said, and as someone who has laughed himself hoarse and found himself gasping or crying a moment later, I can back this up, “Give it a chance. It is shockingly funny. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a hard sell. It’s a weird premise and pitch that could be a very dark and heavy show. The music is fantastic [with] pastiches of all these American genres through history. But then also the book is heartbreakingly beautiful; chillingly dark and then uproariously funny on every other page. It never keeps you on one thing for too long.”
Assassins runs November 11 through 20 at the Columbus Performing Arts Center, with performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit imaginecolumbus.org.