Photo courtesy FUSE Theatre of CT.
On stage, John Wilkes Booth is trying to make a case for himself. An indictment of the former President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln! he sings in a rich tenor. Battlefields covered with bodies flash and swirl though his jumbled mind. That you did ruthlessly provoke a war between the States! He croons through his grief, mourning a war that cleaved a country apart.
Can his words—misguided as they are—tell us something about the current political moment and the legacy of political violence that we don’t already know?
That’s the question FUSE Theatre of CT is seeking to answer this week, as it opens a two-week run of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins at the Music Back Then Performance Theater in West Haven. A musical about nine of the people who have attempted to assassinate a sitting U.S. President, the work has become chillingly timely, in a reminder that art imitates life even and especially in its strangest and most wicked moments.
The performance runs Fridays through Sundays, September 20 through 29, at 221 Bull Hill Ln. Sept. 22 and 27 include American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation. Tickets and more information are available here.
"We all like to think that this is the most unpredictable political time in our history, and we've never seen anything like this before," said director Noah Golden, who has dreamed of doing the show during an election cycle for several years. "And the show is kind of a good reminder that everything old is new again. Our country has been through this many, many, many times in various ways.”
Written in the 1980s and premiered at Playwrights Horizons in December 1990, Assassins tells the story of nine historical figures—John Wilkes Booth (Thom Brown), Charles J. Guiteau (Ethan Sachs), Leon Czolgosz (Derek Petti), Giuseppe Zangara (Lu DeJesus), Samuel Byck (Matt Griffiths), Sara Jane Moore (Sheri Sanders), Lynette Fromme (Em Kramm), John Hinckley Jr. (Violet Falkowski) and Lee Harvey Oswald—who have tried and in some cases succeeded in assassinating U.S. presidents.
On stage with their weapons, each gets a moment in the spotlight, during which they attempt to justify their acts of political violence. As they do, their songs mirror the period in which each character lived—from a Sousa March to tarantella to 1970s pop. A proprietor (Americo Salvi) and balladeer (Omar Sandalky) weave in just enough narration to keep the show going.
“None of the people in this show walk around thinking that they’re the villain,” Golden said. “None of them walk around thinking they’re a deranged killer who people revile. They walk around thinking they have a point to make and they … they walk around thinking, many of them, that they’re going to be a hero.”
Set against a carnivalesque backdrop (because what is more terrifying in the popular American imagination?), they also share the stage with each other, bending time and history itself as a linear construct. The result is a musical container that is both physical and psychological.
For FUSE, which turns four years old this year, the show felt right on time. Since it launched in 2020, the company hasn’t shied away from hard or prickly topics, including in its 2022 Songs for a New World and a production of William Finn and James Lapine's Falsettos last spring. When members were selecting a musical, Assassins fit the bill: it was dark and funny, with hefty characters and writing that felt spot-on. It had an ensemble that was big enough to make things interesting, but small enough to still feel intimate.
Despite a New York revival in 2021, Connecticut also hasn't seen a production of the show since 2017, when it ran at the Yale Repertory Theatre in downtown New Haven. And it was an election year. At the time the show was selected, Golden was looking at a cycle with two presumptive nominees that no one seemed especially excited to vote for.
“We just thought this was the perfect time,” Golden said. “This show was written in the early 90s, but it could not be more timely to where we are right now.”
What he meant, at least initially, was that the show was a learning experience. Over and over again, assassins ask the audience to listen to them as they speak (or rather, sing), trying to justify their actions in the process. All they want is for someone to hear them out. And Sondheim, in the miracle that is musical theater, creates something arrestingly nonpartisan, where even some of the villains are sympathetic.
But back in 2024, Golden couldn’t have predicted how timely it would actually be. Between auditions and rehearsals, cast members watched an attempt on Donald Trump's life unfold at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Then two months ago, Golden held the show’s first rehearsal on July 21—the same day that President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Earlier this month, rehearsals bookended a presidential debate in which lies, disinformation, and a near tantrum all made it to the stage.
Then just before tech week, Trump faced a second assassination attempt while he was golfing in West Palm Beach. To read the news and then walk into rehearsals started to feel surreal.
“It’s kind of like these unprecedented times, but it’s also not,” Golden said. “This country has been through so much upheaval, and these cycles of political unrest and being unsure. And the grievances that some of these characters had 100 years ago, 200 years ago, are still grievances that we have today.”
Em Kramm, who plays Lynette Fromme, agreed that the show provides an opening to reflect on characters who feel so disaffected that they have concluded political violence is the answer. Fromme, who was a member of the infamous Manson Family, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. Unlike many of the characters in the show, she is still living.
"There's a lot of heavy material happening in the show, and we've had a lot of conversations around that," Kramm said. "But I think, kind of floating in the air, is the idea of art imitating reality, and how exciting that is. To be able to bring that to this area of Connecticut and to people in general."
"I love portraying characters that the audience can see themselves in, and I'm really big on like, see and be seen," she added. "I want people to see themselves and have that connection. As a theater performer onstage, getting to look into the audience and see people connecting with the show and having different reactions is really special."
Lu DeJesus added that there's a kind of comfort to having a deeper read on American history. Before joining the cast of Assassins, he didn't consider himself especially political, he said—he still doesn't. But playing Giuseppe Zangara, who attempted to kill President Theodore Roosevelt and did kill Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead, opened his eyes to new history.
"As Noah has said in rehearsal time and time again, things haven't really changed," he said. "In my number, everyone's kind of taking credit for what could have happened, and it's no different than, you know, people on TikTok going, 'I have the exclusive on Gypsy Rose Blanchard,' trying to get engagement, trying to get likes, and have we really changed? That's such an interesting concept in the show as well."
The current moment has also influenced some of the company’s staging decisions, Golden said. Set designer April Chateauneuf, who works for the Goodspeed Opera House, has designed a red, white and blue carnivalesque set, against which the proprietor can set the show into motion. While assassins carry their weapons onstage, FUSE has opted for wooden toy guns, in a move not to mirror or amplify a culture of violence that has become omnipresent today.
Gunshots also don’t go off with a bang, exactly, Golden said—but audiences have to come out to see the show to know more.
He’s excited for them to do so, he added. In his work for and beyond FUSE, he often comes back to the role art can play in not just moving the political needle, but also teaching to the moment, no matter how hard the moment may seem. This show became a living example of that.
“The show doesn’t try to moralize,” he said. “It tries to raise questions and it asks you to listen to these people and understand that as misguided and … whatever their motivations are, they had a point that they were trying to make. And it asks us to listen to these folks.”
“I think it reinforces that all art is political, or most art is political,” he added. “It takes a lot of time and effort to put shows together and to make things, and to work on projects that are meaningful and that say something.”
Stephen Sondheim with John Weidman’s Assassins runs Sept. 20, 21 and 22 and 27, 28 and 29 at the Music Back Then Performance Theater, 221 Bull Hill Ln, Unit B3. Tickets and more information are available here. For more about the show, listen to the episode of WNHH's "Arts Respond" above.