By SHARON EBERSON
The message, before Assassins begins, is in the title. It is about political violence at its most diabolical and deranged. It also comes with a warning: There will be guns, and gunshots. There will be the jolt of a racial slur. There will be discomfort and unpleasantness, and gallows humor wrapped in haunting melodies. And, because Assassins is a Stephen Sondheim musical, following in the footsteps of Sweeney Todd by a decade, there will be discordant ear worms, such as “Everybody’s got the right to be happy … Everybody’s got the right to their dreams …”
No matter that the happiness and dreams depicted are tangled in the killing of sitting Presidents of the United States.
The production of Assassins now at the Greer Cabaret fires on all cylinders in its choice of cast, a group of vocally gifted local artists, mastering transformative performances, led by Allan Snyder’s commanding presence as John Wilkes Booth.
The production by Rogue Artists of Pittsburgh (RAT PITT), an arm of director Michael McKelvey’s Doctuh Mistuh Productions, was chosen to meet the company’s target of bringing to the stage lesser known, rarely performed musicals.
Assassins announces the arrival with a bang. Did I mention there are guns?
Having been mesmerized by the 2004 Tony-winning Broadway revival, it’s unabashed breaking of rules — guns aimed toward the audience, for example, and having listened to that cast album a gazillion times, I was still swept up into the bizarro world of notorious and deranged assassins. They interact across the centuries, enjoying each others company, egging each other on, and standing on the shoulders of those who came before, with Abraham Lincoln’s killer providing the foundation.
As the noted actor and Confederate sympathizer Booth, Snyder’s vocal talents are on glorious display, along with a thorough commitment to playing one of history’s most notorious, self-righteous villains.
Was he avenging the South and punishing the North? “Or,” as the refrain goes, “Was it bad reviews?” Sondheim and librettist John Weidman fire away at the justifications behind each murderous plot.
The idea of “attention must be paid” to the Everyman as motivation is chilling, as is most everything in Assassins. The lure of eternal fame begins with an arcade Proprietor (Allante Walker) inviting each of the disgruntled citizens to come on in, and take their best shot. After all, “Everybody’s got the right to be happy …”
The insanity and mayhem that take flight with the aftermath of Booth’s gunshot at Ford’s Theater, go on to cover the failures and successes of presidential assassins into the 1980s.
(Image: Andrew David Ostrowski)
Connor Bahr as Charles Guiteau, who was hanged for shooting President James Garfield, appears to be having a ball representing the deranged aspirational “ambassador to France.” He prances and preens, sings beautifully, and finds his mark when he doesn’t get his way. The very busy Anthony Marino (he’ll be seen next month in Rent at the Greer) as Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara — he missed FDR but killed a senator — is a man in constant pain, looking for someone to blame, and singing his heart out about it. Alex Noble lends his booming voice to Sam Byck. Dressed in a Santa Clause suit throughout, he rants about war, the environment, and broken promises made by politicians during the Nixon presidency. His threat to grab attention to the plight of the little guy is to “drop a 747 on the White House,” spoken in a pre-9/11 world, Noble’s ravings, expertly delivered, have meta elements, as Byck tries to connect with “Lenny Bernstein,” the composer of West Side Story, praising Tonight as a favorite song (while not noting that Sondheim was the lyricist).
Snyder, Bahr, Griffin Frye as Leon Czolgosz (who assassinated President William McKinley and Zanny Laird as Sara Jane Moore (would-be Gerald Ford assassin) harmonize so beautifully on “The Gun Song,” you almost forget what they are singing about: “All you have to do / Is move you little finger and / You can change the world.”
Laird, the sympathetic lead in Waitress for Pittsburgh Musical Theater and in Little Women for City Theatre, is deliciously unhinged as Moore. She unleashes more shots than anyone onstage, mostly at a defenseless bucket of KFC.
Did I mention that there are guns?
In a preshow speech on opening night Thursday, McKelvey wanted to make sure there were no surprises. He repeated over and over that there would be guns, gunshots, insensitive language … For the uninitiated, consider yourself warned. Again. And again.
That’s not to make light of the themes explored here. When the show first arrived off-Broadway, many critics accused it of glorifying presidential assassins, rather than being a warning about the consequences of how they have been glorified throughout history. Brutus assassinated Julius Caesar 2,000 years ago, and we remember his name. Attention was paid. Booth’s name, too, lives on, as does Lee Harvey Oswald’s. That is the point.
The sweet-voiced, youthful Balladeer (Asher Alcantara), who generally parodies the seriousness of the assembled assassins, morphs into Oswald, buoyed by his predecessors as their gold standard, the assassin whose shot keeps their names in the white-hot spotlight. Attention is paid.
The production on the tight Greer proscenium relies heavily on projections meant to take us to the scenes of the crimes, for example, the barn where Booth was cornered; a Florida beach, as FDR was in Miami during Zangara’s assassination attempt; the crowd watching President McKinley speak, and so on.
From the original Broadway production, I missed the arcade as a representational through-line, although it comes up again in the song, “Another National Anthem,” and when Walker reappears in costume as The Proprietor. Walker and fellow ensemble members Arkida Saiwai, Michaela Isenberg and Marshall Benton move in and out of the action, playing presidents, housewives, crowd members, and more. Saiwai’s Emma Goldman is unwittingly supportive of Czolgosz, on his way to joining the ranks of assassins.
One of the most disturbing and seductive love songs in the Broadway canon is “Unworthy of Your Love,” sung by Corwin Stoddard as John Hinckley and Mae Ryness as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, crooning about their individual obsessions, Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. Although on point, projected images of then-12-year-old Foster as her Taxi Driver character beside an image of Manson was particularly cringy, in a musical that is built on cringe-worthy moments. Guilty laughter came unbidden during the wildly inappropriate conversations of Laird and Ryness, as housewife Moore and Manson-loving Fromme. You gotta love the acting, and along with the cringing.
In this way, Assassins demands, Are you not entertained?, while at the same time marching through more than a century of political violence in the United States.
Of course, today, we come to the musical with the perspective of 21st-century assassination attempts, including the 20-year-old whose bullets nicked President Trump’s ear and killed an attendee during a rally in Butler County. I won’t write his name here.
Attention should be paid to Assassins for the lessons it attempts to teach, about the names that resonate through history for all the wrong reasons, and for the deliriously imaginative musical created by Sondheim and Weidman. The new production by a Pittsburgh-based company, featuring local talent onstage and behind the scenes, is worthy of our attention for all the right reasons.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Assassins runs without intermission at the Greer Cabaret, Downtown, through August 23, 2026 with two performances Saturday and Sunday. Did I mention there are guns? Tickets: https://trustarts.org/production/109094/assassins.
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