John Wilkes, Lee Harvey, Squeaky and Other Gun Aficionados

GUNSLINGER FASHION The 2004 Broadway cast of “Assassins.” Neil Patrick Harris, as Lee Harvey Oswald, is in the center.

 

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED if John Wilkes Booth had turned up – time traveling, one presumes – at the Texas Book Depository in November 1963? What if Stephen Sondheim had written a musical, with a book by John Weidman, about men and women who murdered presidents – or at least got close enough to try? What if John Hinckley and Squeaky Fromme had a duet?

“Assassins,” as Hillary Rodham Clinton introduces it in “Tell the Story: Celebrating Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s ‘Assassins,’ ” which streamed in April 2021, is about history “through the eyes of our villains instead of our heroes.” It began Off Broadway – at Playwrights Horizons in 1990. It went to Broadway (treated as a revival) in 2004, in a limited run at Studio 54 and won a slew of Tony Awards, including best revival of a musical.

 

And now it’s the fifth month of the year 2021, and “the show may be more timely than ever,” as the director Jerry Zaks observes. He’s thinking about the Capitol siege on Jan. 6 of this year, when armed rioters broke into one of Washington’s most revered buildings and announced their intention to kill Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

 

THE ORIGINALS. The cast of the original Off Broadway production of “Assassins” at Paywrights Horizons in 1990. That’s Victor Garber in the center as John Wilkes Booth.

Sondheim appears on camera too, outdoors (the background is said to be a set from is “Into the Woods”). So does Weidman, who remembers the challenges of the show coming together all those years ago – and the miracle that it did. “It’s like we both hit the same vein at the same time.”

 

“Tell the Story” features actors and actresses from past productions, often two or three people who played the same character and now sing the same song. Mario Cantone recalls getting the role of Samuel Byck, whose plan was to hijack a small plane and fly it into the White House with Richard M. Nixon inside..   The duet “I Am Unworthy of Your Love” is sung by Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan (to impress the actress Jodie Foster) and Fromme, the woman who tried to shoot Gerald R. Ford (to impress Charles Manson). Both those efforts were failed assassination attempts.

 TAKING ANOTHER LOOK John Weidman, left, and Will Swenson at a CSC rehearsal of “Assassins” last March, just before New York theaters closed..

There are a few too many pledge breaks, but after Will Swenson has sung the lyrics (“Every now and then/A madman’s bound to come long”), it’s nice to see his wife, Audra McDonald, join him for just that purpose. The benefit is for CSC, Classic Stage Company, whose new production of “Assassins” was two weeks into rehearsals last March, when New York theaters shut down. It’s coming back — we’re almost positive — and it’s not too late to donate.