There are two days left to see “Assassins,” a Stephen Sondheim musical, at Telfair Peet.
It is powerful show, which goes some good way toward humanizing the people who have attempted, and succeeded, in killing American presidents. The entire production is students and they did a GREAT job. It is dark and comical and thoughtful and full of characters who are inept and darkly successful.
The primary players are: John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, and his accomplice David Herold; Charles Guiteau, who killed President James Garfield; Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley; Giuseppe Zangara who tried to kill President-elect Franklin Roosevelt. There’s also Lee Harvey Oswald, Samuel Byck who targeted President Richard Nixon, John Hinckley who shot President Ronald Reagan and both Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who attacked President Gerald Ford.
(Also, Ford did a walk-on spot and tripped on the stage. The few of us olds in the theater got it. No one under 30 understood the bit.)
The Broadway version of the play won five Tonys Awards. I wonder if anyone ever told Hinckley, who is still taking family furloughs from his institutional psychiatric care (but may soon be released). Fromme was paroled in 2009 and apparently lives in the Mohawk Valley region of New York. Moore was released in 2007. You figure they have to know there is a play featuring them as primary characters.
A friend of ours is the director of the show. I can’t wait to sit down with him soon and hear more about it. Mostly I just like to brag on the players and crew. They always do such a great job, as full time students no less, of bringing together incredibly productions.