Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 70

G-3 BMsosfi SUMS Four Broadway plays suggest the range of art and commercialism STAGE REVIEW PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE SUNDAY, MAY 23, 2004 2 1 By Christopher Rawson i fi vnsH P- -V A kit I jlP I'd I U-f. ivf 'vj i 1 1 cx 1 to Joan Marcus Pittsburgh Post-Gazette NEW YORK ry the nation's premier theatri- ileal showcase, Broadway hasn't fX lgiven itself over entirely to IlUcommercial entertainments and revivals. Occasionally it stages art, both new and old. That's what makes it perplexing, as today's four reviews suggest. "Assassins" In exploring the psychology and seamy allure of presidential assassination, this pungent musical vaudeville by Stephen Sondheim and John Weid-man is so fiercely powerful that it successfully breaks what I had thought was an absolute theatrical rule: Never point a gun at the audience.

When that does happen, usually because some actor waves it around, I fume. I don't know if anyone has ever been killed in a theater by a gun that was assumed to contain blanks, but it happens in real life. I hate it. It breaks the fourth wall in a way I think unforgivable. But as the guns were aimed my way in "Assassins," for once and I really do think this the one exception that proves the rule it seemed justified.

"Assassins" is about how assassination is inherent in America. Assassination is us, it says, and for once it seems right that the message be brought home viscerally by guns pointed our way. Indeed, that's a metaphor for the action of the musical itself. "Assassins" indicts American democratic myth in two ways. Taking its idealism at face value, it finds truth in the dark obverse: Not everyone can grow up to be president, but literally anyone can grow up to kill a president.

But it also critiques the larger ideal of equal opportunity by suggesting it may be just myth. It has the myth-deflating insight to note that assassination isn't always individual pathology; it can be driven by political ideas with which many agree, even as they deplore the means. Pretty uncomfortable stuff hardly what you look for in a Broadway musical. And yet this vivid interrogation of "American ideals seems a necessary contribution to democratic self-knowledge. And Sondheim, Weidman, director Joe Mantello, their designers and cast have plenty of show-biz pleasures to offer, too.

Overriding all is the visual metaphor of Robert Brill's set, like the underside of an old roller coaster. It 1 1 Above: "Assassins" resurrects history's presidential murderers and wannabes, portrayed by Neii Patrick Harris (foreground) and, from left, Alexander Gemignani, Jeffrey Kuhn, Mary Catherine Garrison, Denis O'Hare, Michael Cerveris, James Barbour, Becky Ann Baker and Mario Cantone. Left: Bob Dishy tries to win favor with the sly Richard Dreyfuss in Larry Gelbart's "Sly Fox." can light up with the tawdry allure of the carnival midway, but there's always the promise of thrills and disaster rumbling overhead. And it takes only a flick of Jules Fischer and Peggy Eisenhauer's lights to turn that wooden forest into the Texas School-book Depository toward which we inexorably head. The founding father of this not-so-elite club is John Wilkes Booth, whose murder of Lincoln is romanticized by him and uncut by a cynical ballad-eer.

Then come the less well-known figures, both "successful" Charles Guiteau (Garfield) and Leon Czolgosz (McKinley) and not Giuseppe Zangara (FDR), Samuel Byck (Nixon), Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Ford), and John Hinckley (Reagan). All the assassins are present from the start, their stories following Booth's in time-bending order. But as the show proceeds without intermission, you quickly enough realize there's no sight of the most potent assassin of all, Lee Harvey Oswald. Then, under the leadership of Booth, all the assassins gather in Dallas on that 1963 morning to persuade the hapless Oswald who's been there all along without us knowing to make them famous. He was planning to commit suicide, it seems, but they convince him otherwise.

It is chilling. Then I had another rule-breaking moment. After Oswald leans out the window to shoot JFK, images from the Zapruder film are projected on his chest. I couldn't look, although I wouldn't have been able to see through my tears if I had. I was almost ready to invoke a rule about not using painful documentary footage in a fiction.

But it's the natural climax of this powerful Sondheim's score is brilliant in appropriating such American modes as folk ballad, march, spiritual, pop and Broadway and heightening them with the perverse lyrics of murder and obsession. Nothing better illustrates his unsettling genius than "Unworthy of Your Love," the persuasivecreepy pop yearning of Hinckley and Fromme for their idols, Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. This is an ensemble piece, although Michael Cerveris and Neil Patrick Harris are central as Booth and the Balladeer. Marc Kudisch is the lurid Proprietor of the carnival; Denis v4 il ductions in 1997) and New York is just now finding out. Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, 254 W.

54th 1212-719-1300. "Sly Fox" Revivals don't always unearth gems. "Sly Fox," a star-laden farce satire on greed by Larry Gelbart that was a moderate hit in 1976 for George C. Scott, has a long, very funny trial scene in Act 2 that doesn't make up for slow going before and even after. A difficulty is that Gelbart wavers between the corrective comedy of his model, Ben Jonson's famous "Volpone" (1605), and the wilder farce of his own best mode Funny Thing Forum," Some productions solve that ambivalence better than others.

Here, it takes too long for zaniness to set in. As to the Zeitgeist, you would think that greed is always fair game for satire, perhaps especially post-Enron, World Com, et al. But the dynamic of Jonson's play and Gelbart's transposition of it to late 19th-century San Francisco is to get us to root for the outrageously greedy con man (the title role), both because he takes such zest-ful joy in his schemes and because his victims are even greedier than he. At least he seems driven more by the art of the con than its outcome; the comedy has less to do with morality than with inventive joy. SEE BROADWAY, PAGE G-4 O'Hare has the flashy role of the barmy Guiteau; and Becky Ann Baker provides the most humor as the hapless Moore, a klutzy mirror-image of her intended target, Ford.

James Barbour makes a case for the anticapital-ism principles of Czolgosz, and young Alexander Gemignani, who earned his Equity card in the Pittsburgh CLO ensemble, makes an impressive Broadway debut as Hinckley. Music director Paul Gemignani, Alexander's father, conducts the small orchestra located in the balcony, which increases our sense of involvement, already strong from the intimate Studio 54 environment with its small cabaret tables, the same used for the recent "Cabaret." New York Times columnist Frank Rich claims that "Assassins" expresses the American Zeitgeist better now than when it premiered off-Broadway in 1991 during the first Gulf War, specifically because 911 has better prepared us to believe in the darkness of human motivation. The problem with Rich's argument is that the chief evidence the country wasn't ready for the grim truths of "Assassins" then was the all-powerful New York Times review written by Rich himself. That review more than anything else kept producers from moving "Assassins" to Broadway, where it would have had a better chance to speak to the Zeitgeist than in a small, brief, sold-out off-Broadway run. Always beware of seeing the Zeitgeist in your own response.

"Assassins" has always been a sardonic show of great power, as many productions around the country have shown (such as that by Pittsburgh's Starlight Pro- w.l J. mm mi 1 1 By David Segal The Washington Post LOS ANGELES Si len he played guitar in 0 'the world's most notori ous band, Steve Jones lied about his taste in TV PREVIEW 'Lion in Winter' loses its bite in retelling 4 sift 7 St sv Jons regales radio listeners with his tales of Sex Pistols, drugs and rock Yf roll 1 ft I jL js- trv By Christopher Rawson Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -i A fhatever they may have been i KIMM 1 -1 like in real life, King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine are much bigger in Not so notorious these days, the British punk band the Sex Pistols took a break during rehearsals for a 2002 reunion in London. From left are Steve Jones, John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), front, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook. music, and that was probably a good idea. He and the other Sex Pistols were billed as snot-nosed hellions and the scourge not just of parents, but also of arena-rock acts like Pink Floyd and Queen.

Jones loved the songs of fellow punks, but he actually enjoyed some of the groups he was supposed to chase into oblivion. "When I was in the Sex Pistols, I listened to Boston," he said one recent afternoon, citing the band that gave us "More Than a Feeling." "But I couldn't tell anybody, you know. I'd get lynched." The secret is out now. For more than three months, Jones has been host and star of "Jonesy's Jukebox," two hours of radio that runs from noon to 2 p.m. Mondays through Fridays on an FM station in Los Angeles known as Indie 103.1.

(You can tune in online at indiel031.fmmain.html.) Eclectic doesn't begin to describe this mix: On a given day, Jones will spin cheese-pop from the '80s, dub reggae from the '90s and goth-punk from two months ago. He might play three Prince songs in a row, or a track from an up-and-coming group like Franz Ferdinand, or an under-loved vintage punk band such as 999. Outside the realm of college radio, shows with such fearless, anything-goes range are all but impossible to find. Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, circa 1979. literature and legend.

Shakespeare never dealt with them as close as he got was the bizarre reign of Henry's youngest son, John, who also shows up as the bad guy in all the Robin Hood stories, from "Ivan-hoe" to cartoons. But the 20th century leapt happily on the Henry bandwagon, mining the early part of his life for the drama of his youthful friendship and fatal confrontation with Thomas Becket and the latter part for his dynastic squabbles with Eleanor and their fractious children. The best-known version of the early story is Jean Anouilh's play, "Becket," with Henry and Becket played on Broadway in 1961 by Anthony Quinn and Laurence Olivier (Olivier switched to Henry on tour) and in the 1964 movie by Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. SEE LION, PAGE G-5 But the music on the "Jukebox" is just half the fun. The other half is Jones, whose random musings, memory lapses and cockney accent nearly every "th" becomes an so he calls the station "one oh free point one" are as entertaining as any song.

It helps that Jones knows many of the artists he spins, and if he hasn't met them, odds are good that he's stolen their equipment. A drug abuser for years and a kleptomaniac for far longer, he routinely heisted stuff found in studios and then hawked it for heroin. "I was addicted to doing it," he says of his crime spree, chatting off the air in a 45-minute interview. "I didn't care who it was. I just had a mission." Recently, when he introduced a song on his show by the British band lOcc, he didn't just rave about the music, he also recounted the long-ago day when he nabbed a pair of the band's guitars and the day, many years later, that he called up one of the SEE SEX PISTOLS, PAGE G-8 If 1 1- JfSwww.

(all (kl) 456-6666 -jmm wwwtti tes i limine t-r. Groups (ill (MZJ 26H560 All shows at tht Bent dum (enter In the heart of tht Cultural District 75L 1 iiatJi.