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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Ever since Homo sapiens put down their clubs and started fighting one another with property, the vocabulary of murder has been inseparable from capitalism's bravado of success. "Making a killing," "killer instinct," "going for the kill," and "getting away with murder" are shibboleths of the psychopathic style that our entrepreneurial culture applauds and rewards. The sweepstakes of American competition spurs some to greatness; it drives others crazy. At least, that is the story to which Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman are sticking in their vaudeville of vindictiveness, "Assassins" (in revival in a Roundabout Theatre Company production at Studio 54, under the elegant direction of Joe Mantello).
In Robert Brill's splendid fairground set, the first thing that comes into view above a steel-pier scaffolding is a neon sign flashing "shoot! win!" Only four of the nine would-be Presidential assassins whom the show throws together actually got their man; the others form a sort of demented gang who just can't shoot straight. Nonetheless, the homicidal itch in all of them was inspired by what Thorstein Veblen called "invidious comparison"--that particularly American brand of envy which agitates citizens to achieve and acquire, and perversely propels the deranged to spoil or to steal the power they conspicuously lack. "If you can't do what you want to," Sondheim's gang sings, "you do the things you can."
"Murder is negative creation," Auden said. For this musical's marginalized souls, taking aim at a President is the magical solution that can impose coherence on a wrecked life. In the first song, the straw-hatted fun-house proprietor (the excellent Marc Kudisch), who hands out guns to the malefactors as he introduces them to us, portrays them all as frustrated American dreamers: "No job? Cupboard...
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