Review: ASSASSINS at The Lyric Stage Company Of Boston

Stephen Sondheim musicals are inescapable right now, and what’s even better is that they’re being given terrific new productions at every level.

The current Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford-led Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” – the musical Moonbox Productions will also use to open its new Cambridge venue later this week – continues to play to sold-out crowds, while the North American tour of the 2021 revival of “Company” is headed for Boston in April 2024.

The reimagined and reborn Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” a rare Sondheim flop in 1981, just opened to universal raves, as did “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” a starry new revue celebrating the music of the much-celebrated songwriter in London’s West End. When he died in 2021, at age 91, Sondheim was at work on what would be his final, though never finished, musical. Ultimately called “Here We Are,” the work is now being presented at The Shed in Manhattan.

Clearly, the intensely loyal legion of Sondheim aficionados, and anyone who enjoys great musical theater, has a lot to choose from right now. Local audiences, however, should make it a point not to miss the thoroughly entertaining “Assassins” at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through October 15.

With music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by John Weidman, based on an original concept by Charles Gilbert, Jr., “Assassins” premiered off-Broadway in 1990 to a lukewarm reception, and was later revived, with greater success, in 2004 on Broadway, where it won five Tony Awards. The story is built around nine notorious figures in American history, successful or attempted presidential assassins from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley, Jr.

Like most great works, “Assassins” stands the test of time. It may have been written over 30 years ago about events that happened between 1865 and 1981, but it remains ever timely. The dangerous political climate of today that was so horrifyingly on display for the world to see on January 6, 2021, has echoes in the all-company opener, “Everybody’s Got the Right,” and later in “Another National Anthem.”

When a character rhapsodizes, “What a wonder is a gun,” early on, you get a sense of the common thread running through the minds of these different yet somehow similar outcasts. And when you see a gun pointed toward you from the thrust stage, your mind may well go to the last American mass shooting and you’ll be hard-pressed not to feel a chill run up your spine.

Lyric Stage’s Producing Artistic Director Courtney O’Connor helms this perfectly cast production, which can be harrowing in its depiction of these macabre malcontents, but also very funny in certain moments. O’Connor keeps the pace brisk in this one-hour-and-45-minute intermissionless production, which further benefits from a fine four-piece band, led by music director and keyboardist Dan Rodriguez, that is well-matched to the select choreography of Ilyse Robbins.

Booth, a stage actor who shot President Abraham Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theatre during a production of “Our American Cousin” in 1865, provides the musical’s throughline as the group’s unofficial forefather. Robert St. Laurence’s Booth is a rangy egomaniac, singing “The Ballad of Booth” with conviction.

Several of the other assassins or wannabes are less well remembered. Included in this group would have to be Guiseppe Zangara, who failed in his attempt to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami in 1933. His character may have been mostly forgotten, but Teddy Edgar plays him with so many fascinating tics that it’s hard to look away from him.

Also turning in solid work are the nimble-footed Christopher Chew as Charles J. Guiteau, the man who killed James Garfield in 1881, Phil Tayler as the manic Samuel Byck, who attempted to murder Richard M. Nixon by hijacking a commercial airliner and flying it into the White House, and Daniel Forrest Sullivan as the very frightening Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed William McKinley in 1901.

Other standouts in the cast play the two women who in one month, September 1975, tried separately to kill Gerald R. Ford. Lisa Kate Joyce plays Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme with a perfect blend of youthful guile and the insanity and menace she honed as an intimate of Charles Manson and member of his murderous “family.” Her pairing with the comically gifted Shonna Cirone as Sara Jane Moore, a Kentucky Fried Chicken- eating suburban mom set on taking out the president, is inspired.

As is Joyce’s surprisingly sweet duet with the multi-faceted Jacob Thomas Less as the moody loner, Hinckley, on “Unworthy of Your Love,” a song that, were it about a benign couple, might have pop-hit potential.

As the guitar-strumming Balladeer, Dan Prior sings smoothly and appealingly. It is a different story altogether, though, when he slips off his jacket and shirt to reveal a dirty white undershirt and become Lee Harvey Oswald, the marine veteran who shot President John F. Kennedy to death in Dallas in 1963. Oswald instantly becomes the show’s most vivid villain. Indeed, at a recent performance, being reminded of the 35th president’s assassination, almost 60 years ago now, sent the audience into somber silence.

Photo caption: Left to right, Jacob Thomas Less, Lisa Kate Joyce, Daniel Forest Sullivan, Jackson Jirard, Shonna Cirone, and Phil Tayler in the Lyric Stage Company of Boston’s production of “Assassins.” Photo by Mark S. Howard.

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