ASSASSINS

[scenicdesign71]

Dunno how long this will be up on YouTube, but it's worth a watch:

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Here in NYC, Classic Stage -- which had been rehearsing a new, John Doyle-helmed production of Assassins when theaters shut down a year ago -- is doing its own jumbo-sized version of the Tenn Talks event, featuring all the same guests and many more.  Hopefully with better broadband connections.

April 15 at 8pm EST, free to watch, though they do ask you to register beforehand (and donations, as always, are appreciated).

And they are still planning to resume production on Assassins whenever theaters reopen.

(Off-topic, I dearly trust the same will remain true of Broadway's London imports of Company and Caroline, or Change, my two most-anticipated and sorely-missed shows of spring 2020 (despite ample competition in what would have been, by my lights, a busy theatergoing season).  Roundabout is currently claiming Fall 2021 for Caroline, while Company isn't yet hazarding a timeline but will keep you updated if you sign up for its email list).

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I wasn't aware that this has been on YouTube for the past four years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRcdf9U_mww

Not the greatest record one could hope for, but it could be worse; the cast sounds great, and seeing this staging again for the first time in thirty years brings back memories of waiting in a ticket-cancellation line on the wintry sidewalk in front of Playwrights Horizons and scoring a coveted ticket to "the new Sondheim show" sometime during the winter of my sophomore year at NYU.

It also makes me appreciate anew -- as the cast mentions in the Zoom reunion, above -- just how extraordinary the expanded orchestration on the OCR was, after previously only ever having heard the score played by the teeny tiny band at PH.  Hearing them in this video -- the voices as strong as ever, familiar from hundreds of subsequent hearings on the CD, but the arrangements so tinny here -- brings back the shock of getting the album for the first time and finally hearing the score as it was really meant to sound.

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Grrr.    Three days after going on sale (Ed.: actually within hours, I subsequently read somewhere), tickets for CSC's Assassins are sold out.  The night before they went on sale to the general public (i.e. kinda late to be doing this, see below), I filled out their online application to get new tickets in exchange for the ones I'd bought back in 2020.  But there was a note on the application saying they had been overwhelmed with such requests and might take 7-10 days to get to them all -- so I'm not super confident that I'll get to see this, unless they extend the run.

So... here's hoping they extend the run.  I guess that's what one would normally do after selling out within just a few days hours, but these aren't normal times.  For one thing, Assassins, scheduled for spring 2020 but postponed a year and a half by Covid, is now kind of an add-on to their (already late-starting) 2021-22 season.  No dates have been announced for the remaining four shows, which might indicate that there's still some flexibility -- or just that they're hedging their bets to see what happens with theaters reopening this fall (the NYT's tracker calls the city's Covid numbers "still very high" even without winter weather having yet arrived to drive everyone indoors -- higher than they were at this time last year, before vaccines were available).

[scenicdesign71]

Grrr.    Three days after going on sale, tickets for CSC's Assassins are sold out.  The night before they went on sale to the general public (i.e. kinda late to be doing this, see below), I filled out their online application to get new tickets in exchange for the ones I'd bought back in 2020.  But there was a note on the application saying they had been overwhelmed with such requests and might take 7-10 days to get to them all -- so I'm not super confident that I'll get to see this, unless they extend the run.

Correction: this evening I discovered an overlooked email from CSC's box office dated October 7, barely three days after my ticket-exchange request.  It turns out they did exchange our pre-pandemic tickets after all, for some new ones (not great seats, but whatever) on November 23.  Happiness!

[scenicdesign71]

Yesterday I learned that the CSC Assassins (currently in previews with an official opening this Sunday Nov 14) has extended its run for three extra weeks, now closing January 29 instead of Jan 8.

Tickets for the new dates go on sale at noon today at https://ci.ovationtix.com/166/production/1023004 , and I'm guessing they'll sell out as quickly as the original run did a month ago.

[scenicdesign71]

Praised by Variety, panned by the New York Times, but everyone adores the cast.

ShowScore rates it at 86% (with links to 13 critic reviews which likewise swing between the two poles, though audience reaction seems consistently positive):

https://www.show-score.com/off-broadway-shows/assassins-classic-stage-company

Doyle's typically Spartan production bears the brunt of most of the complaints, and while this does sound stripped-down even by his standards (no electric chair for Zangara, no gallows steps for Guiteau to cakewalk up and down, etc. etc.), it sounds as though the performances alone are well worth the price of admission.

[scenicdesign71]

Assassins in the New York Public Library archive:

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2022/01/21/stephen-sondheims-assassins-archive

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The 2022 Off-Broadway cast album is out today; to be honest, I'm not 100% convinced we absolutely needed one, but here it is anyway:

Digital only, for the moment; a physical CD release is planned for April 15.

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A selection of stories about the JFK assassination compiled on the occasion of its 60th anniversary by the editors of The New Yorker:

https://link.newyorker.com/view/5be9d5b92ddf9c72dc1fbeb6jwlys.3sj4/434437d9

This came in a newsletter a few days ago, and the link above is to that email's "view in browser" version; I'm optimistically hoping that this page, and the articles linked therein, will be visible to nonsubscribers.  (Unfortunately The NYer is not one of those periodicals that offers free shares, but it's possible that this archival selection is being made at least temporarily paywall-free for the occasion).

I've thus far read only the Updike piece, dated a week after JFK's death (and five days after Oswald's).  It hauntingly captures the dreamlike disorientation that Sondheim would evoke three decades later in "Something Just Broke".  But I'll always maintain that "SJB" is inarguably a historical montage of complex responses to all the assassinations covered in the show, not just Kennedy's; and that to assume otherwise (e.g., when staging it) is to misconstrue the song in a way that lends unfortunate support to its all-too-numerous detractors (who tend to reject "SJB" on other grounds entirely, but whose arguments nevertheless benefit from any oversimplification of the song's meaning).

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From the link above, I finally finished reading Norman Mailer's lengthy 1995 New Yorker piece on Lee Harvey Oswald's three years (1959-62) living in the U.S.S.R. as a Soviet not-quite-citizen. 

He remains a fairly opaque figure, as even his widow Marina admits in the final paragraphs.  She also notes that actors, working from very limited photo and film documentation, invariably fail to capture the real "Alek" by a wide margin.

Still, it's a fascinating article, and I imagine it would be very useful reading for any actor preparing to play Oswald.  (Wikipedia currently lists 27 "cultural depictions" of him over the years, though their list includes novels and songs as well as stage and screen portrayals).

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NYT:  John Hinckley Jr. and the Madness of American Political Violence

I think I had heard at the time, but later forgotten, that Hinckley became a resident of my hometown upon his release eight years ago.

When I was growing up there, the local celebrity was Bruce Hornsby, an almost exact contemporary of Hinckley (born six months apart in 1954-5) and a far better musician, to put it mildly; Hornsby's big break (and still biggest hit) arrived, at 31, about five years after Hinckley's assassination attempt.