Another journey into the realms of the great American dream with Stephen Sondheim’s blazingly funny, profoundly disturbing musical satire. It takes gallows humour to new levels of sophistication as it forces its audience to laugh down the barrel of a loaded gun.
There’s nothing remotely comforting about this remarkable, breathtaking production from talented young director Nikolai Foster, who takes this complex, challenging material and transforms it into a dazzling thrill ride which never loosens its grip as it hurtles towards that final shocking image of Jackie Kennedy’s frantic, blood-stained scramble over the back of an open-topped car in Dallas.
Matt Rawle’s engaging, charismatic Balladeer loosley connects the sketches. A remarkable cast includes Josie Walker as a marvellously funny Sara Jane Moore, excellent Ian Bartholomew as the inept but ambitious Charles Guiteau, a stylish Hadley Fraser as a dapper John Wilkes Booth and Gerard Murphy as a sweaty, paranoid, increasingly hysterical Samuel Byck.
Intelligent, unsettling and extremely funny when you least expect it, this is as good as musical theatre gets.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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