By Marilyn Lester*** When I tell people my favorite Stephen Sondheim musical is Assassins, I get astounded looks. (Is she crazy?). Assassins is a brilliant creation that’s been horribly misunderstood. With a book by John Weidman, this 1990 work (with subsequent revisions) is actually one of the most patriotic odes to America that I know. It’s a dark but intensely genuine and passionate love song to our nation, especially when the cut number, “Flag Song” is restored to the finale, as it was in the acclaimed 2019 revival at Virginia’s Signature Theater.
Yes, Assassins is dark as can be, but in light of the current state of our country, it was not only prescient but now resonates mightily. The piece features nine men and women who tried to, or actually did, kill the President of the United States. They all had their reasons, told in Sondheim’s take on classic American song forms—Civil War ballads, folk songs, spirituals, cakewalks, hoedowns, barbershop quartets and Sousa marches. Assassins reveals the underside of the American Dream. In exploring it, the piece exposes failures in American society that prevent many people from attaining that dream. Parodied in a carnival setting, “Everybody’s Got the Right,” for example, contains core truths even while contextualized in the most twisted, heinous crimes of murder and attempted murder.
Everybody’s
Got the right
To be different…
Everybody’s
Got the right
To their dreams.
Sondheim’s Assassins is a form of the old dictum: how shall we know what good is if we don’t also know what evil is? The show is a musical compare and contrast. In the end, we are made to realize, as the assassins themselves do, that these misfits, psychopaths, radicals and lunatics, have accomplished nothing, despite their warped “good intentions:”
And it didn’t mean a nickel,
You just shed a little blood…
And it didn’t help the workers
And it didn’t heal the country
And it didn’t make them listen…
In the original ending of Assassins, the group of plotters, who’ve been largely sniping at each other, come together in a common cause. It’s a perversion of solidarity as they sing “Another National Anthem”—a polemic on corruption. It drives home the point that their actions were completely futile.
We’re the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can’t get in…
There’s another national anthem, folks,
For those who never win…
The message, without any presentation of solutions, is that we, the audience, must realize it’s our job to fix our broken society—to find the means to change the ills these assassins protested in their twisted way. To drive home the point, the action returns to Lee Harvey Oswald as he prepares to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Oswald has been purposefully missing for much of the action in the story. This scene is highly metaphorical: Oswald’s “evil” in contrast to Kennedy, who was hailed as the harbinger of a new Camelot.
In the end, we have to realize that the entirety of Assassins is metaphorical. Sondheim is holding a mirror up to us all and saying, “OK, what are you going to do about this, people?” The Signature Theater’s choice to end with “Flag Song” provides a stirring dollop of hope to the message. One can see why it was cut from the original. Sondheim didn’t want to dilute the pointed ending of the 1990 version. He didn’t want to let us off the hook in any way. But 30 years on, this is an America that needs the reaffirmation of why we are Americans more than ever.
Raul Esparza sings “Flag Song.”
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