Stories beyond the script: Assassins and the curse of mythmaking

‘Listen to the stories. Hear it in the songs. Angry men don’t write the rules and guns don’t write the wrongs’, sings the hopeful Balladeer, who leads us through the many folk tales that make up John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. The 1990 musical spins the tale of nine people who tried to kill the President of the United States, with four succeeding. Set in an All-American fairground, a Carnival Barker spurs on these misfits to play a game called “HIT THE PREZ AND WIN A PRIZE”, promising them that ‘everybody’s got the right to their dreams’. Each of these gunmen and women have a variety of motives for their murderous outbursts. Every assassin gets a song to explain why they did it and to, in effect, make up their own myth. Yet in the character of the Balladeer, a wide-eyed modern day folk singer, Sondheim and Weidman give the audience a steady hand to hold. While it may be ‘the Ballad of Booth’ or ‘the Ballad of Czolgosz’, it is the Balladeer who sings them. Reassuring and upright, he projects the received wisdom of what has happened in American history, with the assassins as the clearly defined mad-men. Even those without singular ballads, such as John Hickenly Jr. and the duo ‘Squeaky’ Fromme and Jane Moore, are turned into comic mockeries due to their failed attempts. And as the audience approach the third act, when all but one of the assassins’ stories are told, the Balladeer may be proved right. After committing their sporadic acts of violence, they desperately question why they haven’t got promised prizes and dreams. This is when the Balladeer’s simplistic and optimistic myth begins to fall apart.

While it’s easy to draw modern American parallels to this musical, perverse mythologising can be found as much in Britain and Ireland

The build up to this climatic number, ‘Another National Anthem’, in which the desensitized optimism of the Balladeer is smashed to the pieces by the angry disillusioned passion of the assassins, has been a constant theme throughout the show, just one that Sondheim and Weidman kept hidden. Behind the Balladeer’s clean-cut promises that ‘the delivery boy’s on Wall Street and the usherette’s a rock star’, the grievances of these troubled individuals creep out. Whether they be genuine or not, the anguish and pain the assassins feel are certainly real. From Booth’s bigotry, to Czolgosz’s poverty, to the twisted love that Hickenly and Fromme obsess over, the delusions that these real people suffered from cannot be joked or mythologised away. This is why ‘Another National Anthem’ is so threatening and so rousing. Sondheim and Weidman, by showing their complexities and relatable traits, make humans out of these seemingly inhuman figures. The Balladeer, as singer of the conventual national anthem, is drowned out by a song ‘for those who never win, for the suckers, for the pikers, for the ones who might have been’. Notably, it is this sentiment that leads to the show’s most profound scene. Transported to 22nd November 1963, the eight newly energized outsiders encourage a suicidal Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK. This is where all the myths in the show boil over. Booth sees through Lee’s self-pity and tells him to literally take up arms. When all the assassins converge to convince the young man, they plead that with Lee to revive their acts and give them meaning. That they will be reborn through him, that they are not isolated and deranged, but part of a powerful tradition. A grand historical myth.

The most cherished national myths, that everybody’s dreams not only can come true but should come true, leaves a terrifying prospect

The assassins are rejected by the conventual narrative and so they create a new one, just for themselves. The curse that plagues the characters in Assassins is a universal one.When history becomes simplified and pushed into a certain direction, an empty lot is made for those who don’t fit into that story. And while many may argue that these murderers and would be murderers have nothing in common with the rest of us, Assassins suggests otherwise. Assassins argues that while individuals are, to say the least peculiar, taken as a group, they are peculiarly American. The most cherished national myths, that everybody’s dreams not only can come true but should come true, leaves a terrifying prospect. That if this promise isn’t fulfilled, something or somebody is to blame. An audience may note as well that the assassins, and in most productions, the Balladeer, are all white. When Sam Byck cries out ‘where’s my prize!’ he is crying out for a privilege he thinks he deserves to have, being part of the dominant caste in American society. While it’s easy to draw modern American parallels to this musical, perverse mythologising can be found as much in Britain and Ireland. The lyrics in ‘Another National Anthem’ such as ‘the ones that can’t get into the ballpark’ and ‘for those who never win’, echo as much the riots of last September, as they do the rioters who stormed the capitol building in Washington DC.

If there is a moral to be drawn from Assassins, it can be summed up in another Sondheim lyric: ‘Careful the tale you tell

After being marred in controversy when it opened off Broadway in 1990, Assassins premiered in London in 1992. Then Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse, Sam Mendes, asked Sondheim and Weidman for an extra song between ‘Another National Anthem’ and the reprise of the opening number. If the show up until ‘Something Just Broke’ has been lit up by passionate rage and black comedy, this added song is a moment for solemn reflection. Out of the smoke of all the myths and urban legends of the assassins, the outside reality is the five bystanders who hear the dreadful news. They fear for what has been revealed about their country, ‘something just spoke, something I wish I hadn’t heard’ and wish for someone to ‘fix it up fast’ and that ‘nothing will last’. The hopeful pipe dreams they hold are, like the Balladeer’s, a denial of a more painful and uncomfortable reality. If there is a moral to be drawn from Assassins, it can be summed up in another Sondheim lyric: ‘Careful the tale you tell’.