Assassins (2004 Broadway Revival Cast)
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Music CD Cover
Performer: Stephen SondheimPerformer: Neil Patrick Harris
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2004-08-03
Music Label: P.S. Classics
Soundtracks:
- Everybody's Got The Right
- The Ballad Of Booth
- Ladies and gentlemen, a toast!
- How I Saved Roosevelt
- What does a man do...?
- Gun Song
- The Ballad Of Czolgosz
- Unworthy Of Your Love
- I am a terrifying and imposing figure...!
- The Ballad Of Guiteau
- Have It Your Way
- Another National Anthem
- Take a look, Lee
- Something Just Broke
- Everybody's Got The Right
Free Music Notes for Assassins (2004 Broadway Revival Cast)
Free Music Review: Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins" finally make it to Broadway
Hit: 5 Stars
I picked up the original cast album of "Assassins" simply because it was a work by Stephen Sondheim. The next thing I knew I had a student doing the final scene between John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald as a dramatic interpretation at high school speech contests and our speech team was attending productions of "Assassins" in the Twin Cities and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. So when the 2004 Broadway revival cast won several Tony Awards it was nice to see that this strange little example of American musical theater was finally receiving its due on the Great White Way.
The setting is a carnival shooting gallery where the assassins who tried, successfully or not, to claim the lives of American Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan come together. Each in turn gets to tell their story on their own terms, usually through one of Sondheim's brilliant songs that allow each assassin their own voice. Who else but Sondheim, aided and abetted in this instance John Weidman, would have John Hinckley (Alexander Gemignani) and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (Mary Catherine Garrison) singing a sweet duet entitled "Unworthy of Your Love" as they bemoan their unworthiness to be loved by Jodie Foster and Charles Manson respectively. The simple melody stands in stark contrast to our knowledge of what these two people went out and did in the name of love.
Part of what makes "Assassins" unsettling is that it really does give each character their own say, from the vitriolic attack upon the memory of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris) in "The Ballad of Booth" and the bitter fury of Giuseppe Zangara (Jeffrey Kuhn) in "How I Saved Roosevelt" to the religious fervor of Charles Guiteau (Denis O'Hare) in "The Ballad of Guiteau" and the cold outrage of Leon Czolgosz (James Barbour) in "The Ballad of Czolgosz." Then there is the off the wall insanity of Samuel Byck (Mario Cantone), who has a rant ("Have It Your Way") instead of a song, followed closely by Sarah Jane Moore (Becky Ann Baker).
Helping the assassins to tell their story are the Proprieter (Marc Kudlisch) and the Balladeer (Neil Patrick Harris), although the later doubles as Lee Harvey Oswald at the end. Of course, the idea of television's Dogie Howser as JFK's assassin is a nice little angle for marketing the show. Other historical figures from David Herold and Emma Goldman to Presidents Garfield and Ford pop up at times, played by the Ensemble, as we look at the reasons given by the men and women that made political assassination a peculiar American blood sport. There are few musicals as provocative as this one. You feel like there should be discussion topics that come with the libretto.
True, it is a bit strange to hear these songs sung by a new cast and in often different ways, but having been exposed to a pair of radically different stagings of "Assassins" I am certainly open to the variations. The booklet that comes with the CD has John Weidman's recollections from June of 2004 on the strange twists of fate by which a show that never made it to Broadway ended up with a Tony Award for Best Musical Revival (although the album title simply notes this is "The Broadway Cast Recording") and short biographies of the nine assassins, along with the tradition synopsis and song lyrics.
Of course you should have both CDs because the original has the entire "November 22, 1963" scene when Booth (played by Victor Garber) and the other assassins show up at the Texas Book Depository to persuade Lee Harvey Oswald to join their ranks. However this new recording has "Something Just Broke," the new song that comes between the Kennedy assassination ("Take a look, Lee") and the finale with the reprise "Everybody's Got the Right." The song is sung by ordinary folks, touching on how people remember where they are and what they were doing when they hear the President has been shot, and serves as a serious counterpart to the Ensemble's other big number, "How I Saved Roosevelt." There is a bit more of the dialogue on this CD, including most of Byck's rant.
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