Review Roundup: Encores! Off-Center's ASSASSINS

Encores! Off-Center kicks off the 2017 season with Assassins! The trigger-happy squad assembled for Assassins, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's carnival ride through the history of political violence, will star Steven Boyer(John Hinckley Jr.), Alex Brightman(Giuseppe Zangara), Victoria Clark(Sara Jane Moore), John Ellison Conlee (Charles Guiteau), Clifton Duncan (The Balladeer), Shuler Hensley (Leon Czolgosz), Ethan Lipton(The Proprietor), Erin Markey (Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme), Steven Pasquale (John Wilkes Booth), Cory Michael Smith (Lee Harvey Oswald), and Danny Wolohan(Samuel Byck). Assassins will be directed by Anne Kauffman, with music direction by Chris Fenwick and choreography by Lorin Latarro.

Off-Center reflects City Center's ongoing outreach to new and young audiences. In keeping with this mission, many Off-Center tickets are $25. Tickets can be purchased online at NYCityCenter.org, by calling 212.581.1212, or in person at the City Center Box Office. New York City Center is located at 131 West 55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Jesse Green, The New York Times: The oddness of that applause speaks to the timeless discomforts of "Assassins." The Off-Center production, directed by Anne Kauffman, is most successful in highlighting two of them. At the start, the audience sees nine targets hanging from a gantry, each with a weapon attached, and nine mike stands matching them in a spooky row downstage. (The simple setting is by Donyale Werle.) It's hard to miss the idea of murder as megaphone: The assassins shoot to amplify inner grievances and promote pet causes. At the same time, ordinary Americans - bystanders, mourners - are shown gaining insight or cachet from their encounters with public calamity.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, Newsday: Sondheim and book writer John Weidman structured the show as a series of vignettes, but the usually gifted director Anne Kauffman (Broadway's "Marvin's Room") falls short in pulling them together, and the show never quite jells into an organic whole. Yet the production is still a treat. Sondheim's score cannily echoes the various periods represented, with nods to John Philip Sousa, Burt Bacharach and Irving Berlin, for instance. And for a show about homicidal people, "Assassins" is bitingly humorous - which won't surprise fans of "Sweeney Todd."

Matt Windman, amNY: Kauffman made a lot of choices that I disagree with, such as encouraging the actors to scale down the tone of their performances. Ethan Lipton gives a weak portrayal of The Proprietor, as a ghoulish lounge singer who could not possibly have had any power of persuasion over the characters. Clifton Duncan is overly jocular and silly as the self-assured Balladeer. At the performance on July 12, the sound design was erratic. This is a difficult and challenging musical that works best in an intimate venue - one where the assassins can literally look audience members in the eyes. As such, it was never going to work perfectly at City Center.

Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter: The performers and 12-piece orchestra do full justice to Sondheim's score, which incorporates musical styles inspired by the different historical periods in which the show is set. While it produced no songs that went on to become cabaret staples - not surprising, considering their context - the music is richly melodic and the lyrics witty and provocative, such as when the ensemble of assassins justifies their actions by singing, "Everybody's got the right to be happy/Don't be mad, life's not as bad as it seems." That you find yourself momentarily agreeing with them is a testimony to the power of this haunting, entertaining musical.

Anika Chapin, Vulture: A few weeks ago, the inclusion of a Trump-like Caesar in Shakespeare in the Park's production of Julius Caesar whipped some on the right to an indignant froth. The claim was that the production, by staging a 400-year-old assassination scene with a Trump stand-in, was encouraging violence toward our current president. This week, City Center's Encores! Off-Center series is producing Assassins, the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical about presidential shooters that features as its fourth line, "Come here and kill a president." (It's up through Saturday.) It seems like a good idea to clarify a point in advance: Assassins does not condone assassination (and there is no Trump figure). Instead, by staring down people we'd like to write off as sociopathic monsters, it provides a glimpse at a flaw built into the very DNA of our culture, and a loophole in the American dream that can only beget more violence. And in so doing, it is exactly the piece of theater we need to see right now.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus