Assassins review: ‘Dazzling staging of a flimsy Sondheim show’

The staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at Chichester Festival Theatre is dazzling. The show about nine real-life men and women who killed, or tried to kill, eight US Presidents is usually set in a shooting gallery.

But director Polly Findlay and designer Lizzie Clachan have reimagined it as a political rally. There’s red white and blue everywhere when you enter the auditorium, rousing country-and-western and rock music blaring out, a band dressed as punters and cast members as animal-headed mascots encouraging the audience to do the Mexican wave.

It’s like America exploded in the place (when the curtain rises the set is a brightly-lit Oval Office) and it’s a neat idea but perhaps a misguided one. The plotless show, which Sondheim himself labelled “a book musical masquerading as a revue”, is simply too flimsy to support all this visual bombast. It was, the composer-lyricist declared before his death last year, his proudest achievement but it’s among my least favourite of his many works.

Having characters from different time frames interact with each other is a clever conceit that writer John Weidman (who also did Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures and Passion, two other lesser works in my opinion) deftly pulls off. But there are monologues that go on forever and the tone is iffy. Sometimes comedic and camp, at other times dark and disturbing, it can’t make up its mind as to whether its characters should be pitied or condemned.

There’s also not a single memorable melody in what for a genius like Sondheim is a sub-par score, although the lyrics are as smart as ever. And the Chichester cast give it their all across a continuous 105 minutes in which there are some misguided moments but very few dull ones.

As John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head, Danny Mac rocks a moustache and has an impressive Southern accent. As Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, the Charles Manson cultist who attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford, Carly Mercedes Dyer proves her show-stealing turn in Anything Goes was no fluke. And as Sara Jane Moore, who also tried to kill Ford, Amy Booth-Steel is very funny (she’s so incompetent, she kills her own cat during target practice), although some may question if we really should be laughing at a wannabe murderer from the history books.

Firearms are handed through the curtain to the cast like toys, which might also make some people uncomfortable at a time when the call to tighten America’s gun laws has never been more urgent. When Assassins opened off-Broadway in 1990, Sondheim defended his right to tackle difficult subject matter and rightly so. I just wish the result was less of a misfire. When it’s done in smaller venues, like the Landor and Union theatres, it’s flaws are less amplified than they are here. The production values are through the roof but it’s really just shooting blanks.

Assassins is at Chichester Festival Theatre until 24 June. Get tickets here.