Assassins: Taking Aim

Passion and dispassion at the outset of Assassins

A man stands behind the counter of a fairground shooting gallery. “Everybody gets a shot,” he proclaims, during the opening number of Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins. How prophetic these words will prove to be. 

By the end of “Everybody’s Got the Right,” the opening number in question, we have met our entire cohort of actual and would-be assassins—well, all bar one. We don’t know too much about them as individuals just yet, within the show at least. What we do know is that they are all buying what the Proprietor is selling. Guns, yes, but something deeper too. His words draw them in as much as his wares: the story he tells is one of promise, pride, and, above all, purpose.

Sondheim and Weidman, speaking about Assassins, have both made the distinction between the right to pursue happiness and the right to be happy. “The bleeding of the first thought into the second thought,” said Sondheim (in a conversation piece for Music Theatre International), “is part of what this show is about.” Indeed, later in the show, John Wilkes Booth appears to Lee Harvey Oswald and speaks of two Americas. We explored this notion in more detail in our essay on “How I Saved Roosevelt,” but these two Americas might broadly be seen as, on one hand, a shining city of boundless opportunity, and on the other, a land of quiet desperation. Here, through the Proprietor, we see how Booth’s first America can—and so often does—seduce the second. “If you keep your goal in sight, you can climb to any height,” he says. The assassins do not so much buy from the Proprietor as buy into him. It is perhaps the ultimate sales pitch. And thus begins Assassins, a tale of two Americas: in Booth’s terms, the one “outside that window” and the other “in here.”

The two measures above, from “Everybody’s Got the Right,” occur just before we hear from John Wilkes Booth for the first time in the show. Measure 173 in particular is something to behold, harmonically speaking. If you take the vocal line in isolation, it is perfectly innocent; in fact, hum the words “loud and clear” to yourself and you might notice that, pitch-wise, this figure bears more than a passing resemblance to the “bit by bit” motif in Sunday’s “Putting It Together.” Ah, but underneath… Look at that F♮, F♭, and E♭ all rubbing up alongside one another, not to mention the concurrent C♭ and B♭. How wonderfully Sondheimian it is to reach for maximum dissonance, maximum muddiness, on the word “clear.” And Sondheim was speaking about that very measure when he said (in that same MTI conversation piece), “It’s that dissonance that lets us know that something sinister is going to happen.”

In Booth’s own portion of the show, which follows on directly from “Everybody’s Got the Right,” his notion of there being an America of insiders and another of outsiders is rendered literally, albeit inverted. Lincoln’s assassin hides, wounded, in the tobacco barn of Garrett Farm, along with his accomplice, David Herold. Outside, Union soldiers surround the barn. But in “The Ballad of Booth,” the America “outside” is principally represented by the Balladeer, who oozes an effortless charm as he tells the story of the first presidential assassin. He speculates as to Booth’s motives, goading and taunting him along the way:

Some say it was your voice had gone,
Some say it was booze.
They say you killed a country, John,
Because of bad reviews.

But Booth, maimed and cornered though he might be, is afforded the dramatic space to coherently and sincerely set out his case. The Balladeer almost immediately refers to Booth as a “madman,” but much of this assassin’s own music is soulful, lyrical, gorgeous even. Sondheim himself spoke a lot about the “dispassion” of the Balladeer and the “passion” of each assassin, and here he makes that contrast crystal clear. “The Ballad of Booth,” he said, “is a song about misplaced passion.” But we know, from Sweeney Todd and elsewhere, how far removed this is musically from a Sondheim-penned psychotic break. In his final moments especially, Booth’s words are both clear-eyed and heartfelt:

Damn my soul if you must,
Let my body turn to dust,
Let it mingle with the ashes of the country.
Let them curse me to hell,
Leave it to history to tell:
What I did, I did well,
And I did it for my country.
Let them cry, “Dirty traitor!”
They will understand it later.
The country is not what it was…

Throughout Assassins, it is as if Booth’s two Americas are in court, and America itself is on trial. In “The Ballad of Booth,” both sides present their opening arguments. For the America of quiet desperation, who better to speak first than its original assassin? And we, the jury, are called upon to consider not only one act, but all that led to and flowed from it. For shining-city America, meanwhile, we might imagine the Balladeer as an expensive attorney with a dazzling smile, infinitely charismatic and persuasive as he paints Lincoln’s assassination as little more than the act of a man “off his head.” Central to his case throughout this trial will be his contention, contained in his very first remarks, that figures like Booth may be inevitable, but that their actions are ultimately meaningless in the grander scheme of things:

Someone tell the story,
Someone sing the song,
Every now and then the country
Goes a little wrong.
Every now and then a madman’s
Bound to come along.
Doesn’t stop the story—
Story’s pretty strong.
Doesn’t change the song…

This viewpoint, that the grand story of America is largely unaffected by the actions of these individuals, persists throughout Assassins, and reaches its apotheosis in “Another National Anthem”:

It didn't mean a nickel
You just shed a little blood
And a lot of people shed a lot of tears
Yes, you made a little moment
And you stirred a little mud
But it didn't fix the stomach
And you've drunk your final Bud
And it didn't help the workers
And it didn't heal the country
And it didn't make them listen
And they never said, "We're sorry"—

In the scene that follows “The Ballad of Booth”, we begin to get more of a sense of the other assassins as individuals. Their exchanges, many of which are fractious and volatile, lay the ground for several of the musical numbers to come. Particularly noteworthy here is Charles Guiteau, who seems more a representative of the Proprietor’s America than that of the assassins themselves. In this scene, he toasts the presidency of the United States, proclaiming it “a grand and glorious office,” and rebukes the downtrodden Czolgosz for being a pessimist. “This is America!” exclaims Guiteau, “The Land of Opportunity!” Here, then, is an unusual sort of outcast. President Garfield’s assassin does not seem outwardly bitter, angry, or despondent; rather, he speaks the Proprietor’s language of optimism with fluency, flair, and a generous dollop of self-importance. Later, we will be called upon to judge whether manners truly make this particular man.