It’s no cliche to describe Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical meditation on the men and women who’ve either killed or tried to kill an American president, as history viewed in a funhouse mirror. The fast-paced revue is set in an amusement park shooting gallery where time bends and characters, who never actually knew one another, come face to face.
It’s a place where Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, provides inspiration for John F. Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s a melodic dystopia where the dizzy Charles Manson acolyte Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme teaches dizzy and disgruntled former bookkeeper Sara Jane Moore how to shoot by taking potshots at a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket …
Read the rest of Chris Davis’ review of the U of M’s production of Assassins from this week’s Flyer.
