Why kill a President? For that matter why kill anyone? But the John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins, which has just resurfaced on Broadway, is quite specific. Presidents are the particular name of the game. Basically, Assassins is a serious musical revue providing a survey of presidential mayhem, a continuous saga of the shots that stopped a nation.
In shape it becomes an almost disconnected series of Sondheim musical vignettes, with Weidman taking us through the litany of presidential killers and would-be assassins. Why do such gunmen - in the United States such acts have always involved firearms - pick these lofty but difficult targets? Political motivation? Probably not. Many of these killers are, in America, pretty much household names but John Wilkes Booth apart, can anyone recall their household politics?
The musical suggests that for all of them the motive was as plain as the fabric on a psychiatrist’s couch. They were all losers. From Booth, who envied his brother Edwin’s greater fame, to the other various nut cases and misfits who sought to set their worlds to rights with a well aimed presidential bullet. If this sounds simplistic that is because fundamentally it is. As a result, Weidman’s basic history lesson soon lacks both conviction and interest.
All the guys in Assassins are vaguely deranged, some more off the map than others but their stories were surely more complicated than this attempt to depict the great American dream’s occasional descent into the great American nightmare.
So, the flaws of the show are pretty apparent but, of course, there is always Sondheim who has provided the music and the always stylish, trenchant lyrics and often likes to explore the darker side of the moon. In Assassins he comes up with music that is totally American, from echoing a Barnum fairground to ironically quoting a couple of Sousa marches. The musical, beautifully performed by its ensemble cast, has been deftly and dazzlingly directed by Joe Mantello, with a marvellous, staircase-sweeping design by Robert Brill. The trouble is that the show itself possesses so much more ironic style than theatrical substance, making Sondheim seem like a master marksman shooting blanks.
The first Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play, A Raisin in the Sun, is certainly a matter of some moment. But the big question about the current revival is how well, or how not so well, did that hip-hop king Sean Combs - the artist formerly known as P Diddy - do on what was apparently his stage debut? And in a role made famous by Sidney Poitier yet.
Believe it or not - and admittedly the opinion might sound unlikely to the point of counter-intuitive - he was pretty good. He was playing the petulant, truculent and brooding young hero, Walter Lee Younger, of Hansberry’s 1959 hit, the first play about the black experience to make a solid indentation on the Broadway scene.
The play wears well. It remains engrossing, this tale of three generations of the Younger family, presided over by a matriarchal grandmother, faced with the windfall of a small fortune in insurance and with it the chance of moving from a tenement in Chicago’s black ghetto to a house in a white suburb. Yet looking at A Raisin in the Sun today, perhaps its real tragedy is not how much the world has changed but how much it has, for so many blacks, remained much the same. Today there are many predominantly white suburbs in the United States that would not exactly welcome a black family into their midst. In the black ghetto it might still seem oddly like 1959.
Kenny Leon’s staging proves deft, swift and catches every vernacular overtone and the performance captures just that same iridescent honesty of the original 1959 cast - frozen for posterity in the 1961 movie. Combs’ desperately well suggested shiftless, focusless but yelping vitality is here set up against a living fresco of wonderful acting. All the roles have been cast with care and skill but the three women, Audra McDonald, pained and glorious as Younger’s wife, Phylicia Rashad, resilient and wise as his mother and the flighty but determined Sanaa Lathan as his sister, all give magnificent, brilliantly interwoven performances.
When even the valiant Frank Langella, in a frantic over-acting mode hopefully born out of sheer desperation, can leave a play flat on the stage, as dull as lead, you just know that play is in trouble. The play is Stephen Belber’s Match, which was scarcely born in heaven. The story is annoyingly simple - Tobi (Langella) is a 61-year-old choreographer, residing in Upper Manhattan, yet unluckily with a reputation still residing chiefly in Europe. Two visitors, Lisa (Jane Adams) and her husband Mike (filmstar Ray Liotta, oddly sullen in his Broadway debut), to his cluttered one bedroom apartment, question him on his apparently bisexual past. There appears to be a possibility that Tobi is Mike’s never-known father. Who cares? Tobi’s DNA is tested but not as much as the audience’s patience.
Of rather more interest but seemingly no more appeal for it has already closed, was Eliam Kraiem’s new play Sixteen Wounded, starring Judd Hirsch. It is set ten years ago in Amsterdam and Hirsch plays Hans, a Jewish baker drifting into old age with an ironic and suppressed anger, who one night has Mahmoud (a vibrant Omar Metwally), a young Palestinian, literally crashing into his shop, through a plate glass window, and he virtually adopts him.
And Mahmoud is, of course, a terrorist. Can he make a fresh start? Should he be permitted to make a fresh start? The most remarkable thing about Kraim’s play, delicately staged by Garry Hynes, is that it really takes no side. It is fairly neutral, even while remaining impassioned. Even the conclusion is not a cop out. Kraim has conceived a better formula for a play - nothing is black or white in the ultimate morality - than the play he has written, overly schematic but honest.
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