Traitors and Broadway: Assassins by Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins started off-Broadway in 1990. If you’ve never seen the show, or listened to the Broadway cast recording (with Neil Patrick Harris, no less,) here’s the gist: several successful and would-be presidential assassins like John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, John Hinkley Jr., and Sara Jane Moore meet one another and re-enact their moments in history, urged on by a gun salesman and admonished by a singing balladeer.
It’s a terrific musical, but this isn’t a review.
After the January 6th terrorist attack on the Capitol building in D.C., it felt like a new moment in history. There was armed insurrection on a wide scale. Kidnapping and murder of government officials were narrowly avoided. People kept saying, “This isn’t us. This isn’t what America is about.”
Sondheim’s play begs to differ.
Assassins treats its murderers with varying degrees of ridicule, but special attention is paid to Booth, the group’s “chief” and “pioneer.” In “The Ballad of the Booth,” he lists in a heartbroken song how he assassinated Lincoln to “save” the country from a tyrant that had torn his beloved country apart… before dissolving into spewing spite and racist name-calling. At that point, the Balladeer eulogizes Booth like this:
“How could you do it, Johnny
Calling it a cause?
You left a legacy of
treachery and butchery
we took eagerly and thought you’d get applause.
But traitors just get jeers and boos
Not visits to their graves.”
In the end, Booth, like all the rest, is a miserable man who feels cheated by his country and desperate for attention. In fact, the upbeat, opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right,” is all about America’s promise of happiness and the right to dream. And it’s unsettling to watch sick people work out their grievances with guns on a national stage.
It’s hard not to draw parallels between Sondheim’s take on these historical assassins and the people who stormed Congress. It’s easy to write them off as “not real Americans,” but Sondheim’s musical is haunting because it vehemently disagrees. The people who attacked the D.C. are Americans. They felt they had the right. They wanted the spotlight.
Sondheim’s musical doesn’t make excuses for the assassins, but it does suggest that the lies of the American system (that anyone can succeed, that we’re a city on a hill, that we don’t have a gun violence problem) inevitably break people and our systems of government. John Wilkes Booth was one person, but he was motivated by systemic hatred and desperation. The same is true of just about everyone who turned up on January 6th. The D.C. attacks weren’t new. They were a continuation of some of the same problems we were struggling against in 1865: racism, the rich exploiting the poor and uneducated, and political hatred.
At the end of “The Ballad of Booth,” the Balladeer sings:
“Lots of madmen have had their say…
but only for a day…”
It’s a comforting thought. But Assassins ends in gunfire, and the Balladeer, the only conscience on stage, doesn’t even survive to see it. Violence speaks louder than optimism in Sondheim’s play. Looking around, it’s not hard to see why.