CDs: Something Just Broke

Even after receiving rave reviews and the most Tonys won by any show in 2004, the Roundabout's revival of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins folded in July after only a three-month engagement, unable to fill out a run that might have extended until another Sondheim-Weidman show, Pacific Overtures, takes over Studio 54 this fall.

It's well known that the 1991 off-Broadway premiere of Assassins was greeted with mostly hostile reviews and failed to transfer to a commercial engagement. But for all of its acclaim, this season's revival ran only a little longer than the off-Broadway version, albeit in a larger venue. But then Assassins is one of those shows that's never likely to please a wide audience or enjoy an extended run. Like the 1997 Broadway musical Side Show, Assassins features subject matter that some are bound to consider unpleasant or unsuitable to musical treatment. Perhaps that also explains why, unlike such Sondheim shows as Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods, and Passion, the new Assassins was not videotaped for telecast and commercial release.

Although not many people got to see the '91 Assassins that played at Playwrights Horizons, it left a superb RCA Victor cast album, a remarkably lavish recording for a show that was, for the most part, critically reviled. At Playwrights, the show was accompanied by just three musicians, Paul Ford piano, Paul Gemignani percussion, and Michael Starobin synthesizer. But on the '91 RCA cast CD, the score was played by up to thirty-three musicians, performing orchestrations created for the recording by Starobin.

Those three gentlemen were reunited for the Roundabout's Assassins, with Gemignani back as musical director, Starobin winning a Tony for his orchestrations, and Paul Ford back at the keyboard. The orchestra at Studio 54 numbered thirteen players, and if it lacked some of the richness of the Victor performance, it was a configuration well suited to Sondheim's kaleidoscopic score that ranges from gospel to Sousa march to barbershop quartet.

Because the Assassins score is relatively brief, the RCA recording included the eleven-minute Texas School Book Depository scene. While it's a gripping sequence, the track was one that listeners may have chosen to skip on repeat playings. With the release of PS Classics' new recording of the Roundabout revival, a New York Assassins has once again issued a posthumous CD, and this time the choice was to offer dialogue highlights throughout, including the Booth scene also heard on the '91 recording; the set-ups for the Zangara and Guiteau numbers; an Emma Goldman speech; Byck's second monologue; and the latter part of the Book Depository scene. This plan works well, even if the five-minute Byck speech, while allowing Mario Cantone a presence on the disc, may be one you'll skip on subsequent playings.

The new Assassins CD has been attractively packaged, the booklet featuring numerous color photos helpful for a production that never produced a souvenir program, along with printed lyrics and synopsis. Weidman has contributed an introductory essay discussing the failure of the '91 production; the show's rehabilitation on college campuses; the post-September 11, 2001 cancellation of the Roundabout production; the near-cancellation of the 2004 mounting; and reasons for the markedly different critical reaction that greeted the revival.

Because most critics altered their opinion on Assassins after seeing the new production, some will assume that Joe Mantello's Roundabout staging made Assassins work in a way that Jerry Zaks' production at Playwrights did not. As one of the few who cheered Assassins the first time around, I found the revival quite satisfactory but falling short of the impact of the original. Some of that may be due to the show's built-in shock factor, which is bound to decrease with revivals.

But I also found few of the new cast members to be quite the equal of their counterparts in the original. Hearing the Roundabout cast again on this excellent new recording, I miss the subtler approach of a couple of the originals. For example, I prefer Victor Garber's elegant, ironic Booth to Michael Cerveris's strongly sung but somewhat broad account. Similarly, Denis O'Hare's scarily unhinged Guiteau is a bit more strenous than Jonathan Hadary's cheerfully demented version. And Mary Catherine Garrison's vocal on "Unworthy of Your Love" can't match Annie Golden's.

But that's not to say that the new recording doesn't offer a uniformly commendable performance, with especially fine work from James Barbour, Neil Patrick Harris, and Marc Kudisch. If the renditions on the new set don't surpass those on the first Assassins recording, there are also no weak links in the revival cast.

And of course this recording possesses one major new attraction, the presence of "Something Just Broke," a song that Sondheim added, near the end of the show, to the 1992 Donmar Warehouse/London production. It's been heard in most productions of Assassins ever since, but has never until now been recorded. Depicting the reaction of everyday citizens to the sort of horrific events depicted in the show, "Something Just Broke" is less jarring on disc than it was in the theater. But I still don't find it to be as strong as the rest of the score.

In general, this new recording provides a fine account of Sondheim's darkly chilling song cyle of Americana while also offering a comprehensive picture of the show as a whole. If a New York production of Assassins was, once again, unable to stick around long enough to see its cast album released, the revival, like the original, has produced a potent disc.

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