Tell Me What I Should Do (up to 9:33)
I've seen Assassins live twice, and both times the thought occurred to me: could we be arrested merely for watching this?
Threatening to kill a President is still a Federal Offense: a Class-E felony under United States Code Title 18 Section 871. It is illegal to make “any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States.”
Personally, I think that’s a violation of Free Speech that can push insane people capable of mass murder over a parking ticket over the edge into willing martyrs. But during the era of the first Black president, perhaps these violations made a slight bit of sense. Now that we're living in the Trump era, well... let's just count ourselves lucky that this statute hasn't been used against any of Trump's enemies yet.
But whether you saw Assassins during the Obama era or the Trump era, you can’t see a creation as explosively relevant to our time as any work could ever hope to be, and not see that this work can change our world in the span of an eye-blink - and let's face it, that change could even be for the good, but it could very much be for the ill, and would probably be a world-shaking mix of both, But in an American era when nearly 300 million guns are held for private use, when Presidents of both parties are routinely compared to Nazis, when a day with mass shootings is practically the rule rather than the exception, there is no more explosively powerful work of art to our time. This is the rare work of art that does precisely what Plato warned against in The Republic. It practically puts the gun in assailant’s hands.
This unholy blast of drama could be written by Satan himself - it's America’s answer to Macb*th. It’s practically an incitement to terrorism and shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the American Dream was built upon dirt and shit, and does nothing to console us with any redeeming vision. The American Dream is real, don't believe anybody who tells you that it's a lie. But the America of people’s nightmares just as much the true America, and we’re all just fooling ourselves if we think America isn't and wasn't a cesspool of despair for hundreds of millions of citizens.
When Assassins premiered in the week before Christmas 1990, the mood in America was as happy as ever since the end of World War II. After forty-three years of worry that the Soviet Union could incinerate us in an instant, the Cold War was finally done with and we won. The Persian Gulf War was humming along (quote-unquote) ‘peacefully,’ its resolution in clear sight. It was the first moment since Vietnam that everyone but the most hardened Leftists agreed that America's exercise of power for good, not evil.
No American was ready for Assassins in 1990. The reviews were crushing and the show closed after 73 performances - respectable for any Broadway composer but one whose every work turned to gold. Broadway planned a revival for October 2001. I needn't tell you what happened...
What makes Assassins all the more effective is the musical irony, it has all the tropes of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and yet music that could just as easily be sung by Ethel Merman about the hopes of Okies working the land, depicts more than a century’s worth of famous terrorists - all of whom motivated by the fanaticism of the pathologically lonely, nihilists to take their place along the lineage of Edmund from King Lear to the Underground Man to the Joker, who want nothing more than to spread chaos and suffering. Fifty years before Assassins, Rogers and Hammerstein gave Oklahoma, a vision of boundless hope - in Assassins, the American Musical comes full circle with a vision of endless despair.
This is a musical that depicted Sam Byck, who, thirty years before 9/11, attempted to hijack a commercial airliner so he could ram it into the White House. This musical that shows Charles Guiteau, the Christian fanatic who killed James Garfield, anticipating his death with all the ecstasy of a suicide bomber: according to the famous critic, Frank Rich - “you find yourself wondering if he’s expecting 72 black-eyed virgins as his posthumous reward.”
Is Assassins truly good enough to sustain a comparison to Macb*th or King Lear? I have no idea. What I do know is that like even the lesser Shakespeare plays, Sondheim’s words are like a hallucinogen in which you can immerse yourself to a consciousness altering state. The pure voluptuous pleasure of hearing so many ideas fly past you at light speed is something you can only otherwise get from Shakespeare and Mozart. Yes, Sondheim’s that good, and I envy anybody who has yet to fall in love with his work. This podcast will come back to Sondheim many times.
Like Shakespeare and Mozart, like Dickens and Beethoven, Chekhov and (ahem) The Simpsons, Sondheim always leads you home. Every dark moment is balanced with a light one, every lofty sentiment with pure vulgarity, every piece of realism balanced with surreal magic. It speaks to the mastery of this creator who holds a mirror up to Nature that Sondheim has the balance which you can only find in the very most immortal.
But while other works of Sondheim, with all their cynicism and heartlessness, can still hit you squarely in the feels, Assassins has pure acid and black bile in place of its heart. It begins and ends with the song "Everybody's got the right...", the right to happiness; and since everybody has the right, everybody also has the right to kill the President... Sweeney Todd, often called the ‘Great American Opera’, is similarly dark, but it’s just a warmup act for what we get in Assassins. In Sweeney, there is always a wink, a nod, something that assures us that this is all a fairy tale or a Grand Guignol melodrama, an enjoyably spooky nightmare. It pulls the cape away with a whoosh and shows it was all a joke. Assassins shows us a world where you can kid about the darkest subjects, only to pull the cape away again, and reveal to us at all that there was no joke at all.
Assassins is a comedy so black it ceases to be funny. It’s so light that half the lines in the musical could probably be interpreted as laugh lines, but the stakes are American History itself. Sweeney Todd makes the audience enjoy humanity's dark underbelly, but Assassins insidiously worms its way into our souls and eats away at our faith in humanity.
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