Assassins at CSC

[scenicdesign71]

Casting has been announced for the upcoming John Doyle production:  Judy Kuhn, Stephen Pasquale, Will Swenson, Wesley Taylor and Brandon Uranowitz.

And others to follow, presumably (unless Doyle plans on having them play two assassins apiece, plus "Bystander"/ensemble roles as needed, thus demonstrating beyond all doubt that the long-running trend for miniaturizing Sondheim has played itself well-and-truly out).

Apart from Kuhn, who it seems safe to assume will be Sara Jane Moore, I'm not hazarding any guesses as to who's who.

[DiveMilw]

I've heard Pasquale will be Booth.  I can't fit his soaring voice into Booth's songs.  Just found a casting announcement which, among other things, says he played Booth at Encores two years ago. I will have to try to find a clip.  I love his voice so I'm interested to hear how it sounds in songs that would not be described as "sweeping".  

Here's the relevant part of the announcement:
"Pasquale, who will play John Wilkes Booth, is one of five high-profile stage actors who will be taking part in the production. Also announced was Fun Home's Judy Kuhn, who will play Sara Jane Moore; Will Swenson (Hair) as Charles Guiteau; Brandon Uranowitz (Burn This) as Leon Czolgosz; and Wesley Taylor (SpongeBob SquarePants) as Giuseppe Zangara."

[scenicdesign71]

Digression, sort of:  Last night I watched the first five episodes of Netflix's new Ryan Murphy dramedy The Politician, with Ben Platt as the titular high-school egomaniac.  Watching Ep 6 ("The Assassination of Payton Hobart") right now, I stumbled onto possibly the most preposterous subplot so far (despite scads of extremely stiff competition), one that wasn't mentioned in any of the reviews I've read.  Payton (Platt) has contrived to get himself cast in the spring musical... one guess as to what it is.

Hint: I'm reasonably sure we're gonna get Payton and Infinity (Zoey Deutch) singing "Unworthy Of Your Love" at some point.  (Earlier in the series, Platt gave an effective rendition of Joni Mitchell's "River," and I had a feeling there might be more where that came from, though I didn't necessarily expect it to be airlifted into the storyline as clumsily as this).

In a ludicrously baroque touch, even by Murphy's standards, Infinity's jealous, dim-bulb trailer-trash boyfriend Ricardo decides -- despite not going to the school in question -- to horn in on the high-school-musical action as well, auditioning with a song from ALW's Love Never Dies.  (!)

...And wins the part of Booth. (!!)

...After a lovers' quarrel that ended with him deflating Infinity's excitement by insisting that Squeaky isn't the leading role -- Hinckley is. (!!!)

It's a bizarre bit of writing that relies on an audience having a spectacularly specific configuration of half-knowledges and outright-ignorances -- about Assassins, about American history, about theatre geeks and teens more generally -- to make even a strained semblance of half-sense.   But being asked, in the first place, to believe that this lunkhead would ever have even heard of Assassins takes the cake with such breathtaking shamelessness that... well, suddenly it's like Glee never ended.  Sometimes I wonder whether Murphy actually thinks of the exasperated eye-roll as a highly covetable viewer response.

Sorry, end of digression.  I just had to pause mid-episode to vent.

(Ed.:  By the end of the episode, we do indeed get "Unworthy," in a decent performance by Platt and Deutch that's marred only by overreliance on auto-tune -- again, shades of Glee -- followed by a cartoonishly butchered fragment of "The Ballad of Booth," more or less along the comedic lines of a male Miranda Sings, though it might have made a more interesting twist for the clownish Ricardo to have harbored an unsuspected shred of real talent.)