‘I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change’ Filmed at London Coliseum: A Great Example of How to Film a Stage Show

“Someone tell the story, someone sing the song. Every now and then the country goes a little wrong. Every now and then a madman’s bound to come along! Doesn’t stop the story – story’s pretty strong. Doesn’t change the song.” Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant, dark, and often funny look at what drives certain people to commit atrocities, “Assassins” is an exceptional and provocative show. Its current production at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory is one of the most well-done shows I have yet seen in London. If you are a frequent reader, you may be thinking, well that doesn’t say much. However, I could say right now that I found not a single fault with it…but then you’d have little reason to keep reading, so I won’t. 

These above-quoted opening lines of the show (the true opening of the story, after a crazy sort-of prologue) reflect what our main characters seek: for their story to be added to history, to become part of the main story, be sung of. To gain fame as part of history’s need to always mention them in the same breath as the great men they assassinated. And that’s what this story brilliantly tells – how Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Reagan, Ford, all these important presidents, were killed or almost killed, but by barely mentioning their names. The names that matter here are the assassins – Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, Hinckley, Fromme – as we see things from their perspectives. To make things even more twisted and frightening, this is staged in a sort of abandoned carnival, with each assassination attempt treated as a carnival game and lit-up “Hit!” or “Miss!” signs accompanying each gunshot. Like carnivals weren’t scary before.

First, the central character: “Johnny Booth was a handsome devil!” These lyrics are hella true in this production. Broadway’s Aaron Tveit is adoooorable. More importantly, he handles the vital role of John Wilkes Booth sublimely, being a charming and debonair Southerner who clearly conveys a base desire for ill-gained notoriety. Although his main action (killing Abraham Lincoln, obviously) is done early on, he hangs around to support the others, because, as the Balladeer sings early on, “Damn you, Johnny! You paved the way for other madmen to make us pay!” Booth pretty much started a trend in America, and so his presence is required throughout the show. 

Despite his inherent evil, Booth seems the most stable of all the characters, and probably is. The most unstable is also my favorite. “Look on the bright side, not on the sad side…I am going to the Lordy”, sings Charles J. Guiteau, the most weirdly likable character in this production, probably because the actor, Andy Nyman, is so damn good in this role, petrifying but kind of lovable. Guiteau was executed for killing President Garfield, after being denied the ambassadorship to France, which he had long assumed would be given him when he requested it. Some of the lyrics to his big song actually came from the poem he wrote the day of his execution and recited on the gallows as he laughed and danced, before hanging. The poem was called “I am going to the Lordy”. Sondheim turned this into the most catchy, horrifyingly optimistic song that captures Guiteau’s, well, gallows humor and clear insanity. Here, Guiteau also sings and dances on the gallows, performing a cakewalk and an ever-intensifying song before swinging from the noose in front of us. It’s so disturbing and so powerful. Also, Nyman does the best American accent by a Brit that I’ve heard so far in London theatre. 

Before deciding to kill the president, Guiteau writes books that don’t sell and he convinces himself and others that he’s the future Ambassador to France. By seeing our characters’ failures and blown ambitions, you start to feel for them. You think, this poor guy couldn’t catch a break, and yes obviously needs mental healthcare that no one is going to provide. The music and the stories lead you on a path to almost commiseration, and then hopefully you snap out of it and realize how f-ed up you have to be to consider making this turn. But that’s the genius of “Assassins”, showing history from their perspectives and forcing you to recognize their humanity.

Personal failures as well as professional failures take blame for coaxing some down this path. “I am unworthy of your love” is a duet between two strangers, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Carly Bawden) and John Hinckley Jr. (Harry Morrison), the failed assassins of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, respectively. The memorable and pretty lovely song shows how some are led towards awful deeds in trying to impress others. The show’s Hinckley is an odd man who can’t find love, in the all-too-familiar sense of men like the Santa Barbara killer who get angry and frustrated when women, whom they were told their whole lives that they as men were entitled to, rebuffed them. Our society’s continued view of women as playthings and pretty things that men should have a say over is creepily reflected in this character, as he decides to kill a president in order to impress a movie star enough that she’d actually know he existed (as opposed to, say, the modern version of men killing the women who threaten their world view).

Fromme, on the other hand, tries to assassinate Ford in order to impress her lover, Charles Manson, whom she believed was Jesus reincarnated. And if Jesus wishes for you to kill the president, you do that! (No, seriously, don’t, even if it’s really Jesus.) Luckily, she and Hinckley failed. In this production, Fromme’s failure is shown as mostly due to her ridiculosity of a partner in crime, played by British favorite Catherine Tate as Sara Jane Moore. It’s a smallish role but she’s hilarious. A lot of people think Tate plays it too over the top, but I found her antics necessary to brighten up all the dark psychology of the show. (Except when she accidentally shoots her dog. Not funny. Luckily a stuffed dog was used, so sort of funny.) Her best bits include her shooting practice on a bucket of KFC, after which she eats the chicken. But nothing is funnier than when Moore and Squeaky botch their assassination attempt so freaking badly that, in their mad rush to complete it in a crazy moving crowd, they are unable to reload and instead throw bullets at Ford while shouting ‘Bang!’ Amaaaazing.

The real brilliance of the show is demonstrating how a person’s disappointment in living a small life can lead to such a path, just to make some kind of name for himself. And we know this so well. Mental instability of all sorts leads many to commit mass atrocities because, as we know, our media will make perpetrators famous. Whenever the awful story of a school shooting or of President Lincoln’s final days is told, so too will the name of the murderers, or of Booth. 

No one explains this better than Booth himself, who uses it as a selling point when trying to persuade our narrator, the Balladeer, whose identity becomes a beyond genius twist (that was added in the revival, and I can’t see the musical being as poignant without it).  In the recording I know best, my balladeer was Neil Patrick Harris, so my favorite songs had a pop-star clarity and zest to them. Here, the Balladeer is sung like a twangy country singer by Jamie Parker, but it totally works and won me over. So the Balladeer has been on the sidelines all night, telling the tales of others most judgmentally – in the above-quoted “Ballad of Booth”, he reinforces that those madmen who have made us pay “have had their say, but only for a day….Angry men don’t write the rules and guns don’t right the wrongs. Hurts a while but soon the country’s back where it belongs.” But as things come to an end, the Balladeer is not so convinced that the country bounces back so easily, if ever, and he’s more open to discussion about leaving his moral high ground, not wanting to end things as a simple narrator strumming his guitar, but as someone who, like his subjects, will live forever in infamy as long as his target lives forever in fame. Booth tells him that their names will always go hand in hand, that just as Lincoln’s great life and deeds will never be studied without Booth’s being studied and remembered as well, so too will the next great Assassin in this way share the triumphs of his victim. It’s incredibly disturbing and true, that a killer can so easily usurp the greatness of his victim. (I wish so strongly for the media should stop reporting the names of people who commit mass shootings and the like, somehow, if it would make sense. Gaining such immediate fame is often the only goal, and I wish there was a way to not give these awful people the satisfaction of being remembered. (It would also be great if we had legit mental healthcare systems but that’s maybe more farfetched.))

All of this is demonstrated pretty remarkably by The Proprietor, the gun salesman and carnival runner, played hauntingly by Simon Lipkin, who represents a sort of universal id. He lures our characters into the darkness by reminding them of the show’s eerie twisted theme, that “Everybody’s got the right to be happy”. He opens the show with lines like, “Hey kid, failed your test? Dream girl unimpressed? Show her you’re the best – if you can shoot a president”, chillingly blunt lyrics that immediately set the disturbing and blackly humorous tone for the show.

That Sondheim makes you think all of this, makes you laugh and feel heartbroken at the world, all in a 100 or so minute musical is a testament to his genius. That this extremely difficult show is such a rousing success is a testament to the Menier, to this spectacular cast, and to this faultless production, which is now completely sold out, and rightly so. With any luck, it’ll transfer to mainstem West End so more people can appreciate how freaking great this show is.

It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “Red” on the West End, playing until the end of July. 
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Although giving props to white men right about now is the last thing we should be doing, I have to give some (is it a mass noun?) to white male playwright John Logan for being the first person to depict serious art and the modern art world without making me scream from the cringe. (“Sunday in the Park with George” is not about modern art and it is still the best depiction of the artist and the creative process ever to exist in the history of the world.) Whenever I’ve watched stories about self-important artists, fictional or not, or even just gone to a modern art museum (ew and oh no) my main thoughts have been ‘oh my gooooood get over yourself’. The whole ‘I have something to say and this splash of paint thrown against a singed canvas represents that but also progress and our birth’ charade makes my blood boil. Maybe it’s just because artists are so often portrayed in pop culture as pretentious wankers who really believe they have something urgent to say but they really really don’t, like Sky in “Red Oaks” (great under-the-radar show, go watch it). And all of her insufferable artist friends man alive they are the perfect example of this. You just want to Cher in Moonstruck all of them. Anyway before I start ranting even more about all the various portrayals of arrogant, affected artists in movies and TV, let’s talk about this representation of a modern artist that I actually bought into and understood, the play “Red”, about Mark Rothko’s tortured creative process. 

It’s quite surprising that the subject of a play that made me more sympathetic to the strife and struggles of tormented artists is Mark Rothko, whose famous canvases are exactly the sort that would normally make me comment ‘well I made that same thing when I was five um what’ so yes this play is an achievement. It’s easy to recognize a Rothko work because it’s the one with a smudged rectangle of one color painted on it and if you’re lucky you get a second smudged rectangle of a different color. It’s the epitome of art that I simply don’t understand. It’s not that I like or dislike it but there’s only so much you can ‘feel’ from looking at a smudged rectangle, you know? How do people pay millions of dollars for big canvases with just a messy red square on it? Happily, these are questions that Logan addresses in his play “Red”, which originally premiered in London and now is back on the West End with original star Alfred Molina as Rothko.
 
Molina’s Rothko is the kind of performance that makes you forget that you are watching one. It quickly lets you dive in and accept that you’re watching Rothko the artist work, without ever thinking about his acting. It’s a rare performer that can so completely inhabit the character like that, erasing any trace of the actor or his well-known past performances and just presenting Rothko on that stage so fully. I didn’t get to see Fred (as his friends call him) perform this role on Broadway after its premiere but I understand now how he could have won that year’s Distinguished Performance Award from the Drama League, the best acting award there is really. I get how this performance could have defined what acting is and should be for a whole season. Fred’s costar in this production fares well but not nearly as expertly. Alfred Enoch plays Rothko’s assistant, and so we have probably the first play in the history of the theatre/the world where 100% of the cast is named Alfred. So, Enoch’s playing the role that won Eddie Redmayne a Tony. I imagine Redmayne, a stellar actor, probably also disappeared into the role, while Enoch, though he does a great job, still showed me that he was Acting quite often, mainly when using props – opening jars, mixing paint. It was often a little too stagey. Honestly, I kept thinking of the part in “Oh, Hello” when they talk about using props and John Mulaney says, “Please, do WAY too much business with the phone. Really show the audience you’ve been working with the prop all week” and Nick Kroll says “Really make a meal out of it.” So that’s what his performance, while commendable, kept reminding me of. A little too unnatural, maybe because most of his career has been onscreen (although that’s over right now #wesforever).
 
The play begins with the new (fictionalized) assistant arriving for his first day of work. I just looked up what the assistant’s name is and it’s Ken and I’ve never been so surprised by a fact in my life. I don’t think they ever say it but also like who is named Ken anymore. I guess this was supposed to take place more than 50 years ago but were there even Kens then? Ken (I mean) arrives in a suit for his first day of work and that’s cute but his work is in Rothko’s messy, splattered art studio so Rothko’s like “that’s cute, go change” and I like that he was a no bullshit kind of guy like that but at the same time sooooo full of bullshit like when he talks about how his red glop of paint represents everything anyone has ever felt and all that. But wait, like I said I don’t actually think that’s all utter bullshit anymore, actually, because of this play. Watching the creative process and hearing the artist debate what his work means with another artist, kind of in their own Socratic method to get to the heart of the matter, was enlightening for me, a renowned modern art truther.
 
Mark and Ken work together to produce Mark’s famous four murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in Midtown Manhattan. Ken is shocked that Mark accepted such a commission, creating art for a dining room full of rich obnoxious people that he despises. But Mark’s hope is to destroy their appetite, ostensibly by making them confront their inner demons and fears and passions and maybe realize how terrible they are by forcing them to confront what they feel the red means. And that question, what the red means to the individual, is mainly what Ken and Mark discuss in between mixing the paint and prepping the canvas – the latter of which is the most fun bit of the play, and from the looks of the Alfreds afterward, the most exhausting cardio. The question of what the red means, and how different and complex it can be for each individual, and all that talk talk they make in my earholes about it, is honestly what got me to come around on the whole modern art thing. Well at least Rothko’s. Well at least his red series. There is meaning and such depth of emotion and personal history and tragedy and fear and hope behind those colors, even though it looks like a simple square of paint that could have been done by a child. There really is more to it than that. And while I don’t think it should be necessary for a play to make you appreciate art, I’m grateful that this one makes me a little less hateful towards that gallery across the river from me (cough *Tate Modern* cough).
 
Despite being far from warm, the relationship between the two men is the provocative aspect of the show. I love how time passes for these men – two years at least – and it doesn’t seem like it. Ken seems just as unsettled at the end as he did at the beginning, and Rothko is just as detached, despite their heated discussions. I bet that Ken never showed him any of his own work. Mark wasn’t that kind of guy, the one you show your work to and ask for his ‘honest’ opinion. It would be too honest. Yet it’s clear they care for each other; you just have to understand how the artist’s mind works, as I do now (laugh). Even in his final act towards Ken, Mark doesn’t seem affectionate or caring, but his actions speak much more than his words or demeanor. There’s so much more to them than whether or not Rothko can be a nurturing father figure (he can’t) or whether that’s even what Ken wants. And there’s more than meets the eye with how the action is staged too, like how Ken finds a superdrunk Mark with his hands in his paint bucket one night, an undeniable reference to his real-life suicide. This kind of subtle direction plus the way the characters communicate with each other all feel connected to the issue of the colors and how sensitive the interpretation of them can be to each person, how just the color red can reference an entire lifetime of emotion. “Red” isn’t a big important political play or anything; it feels like a pleasant but small exploration of personalities more than anything. But if it can say so much about art and moreover get you to consider art more thoughtfully and genuinely than you had before, then that seems pretty important.
 
INFORMATION
The toilets at the Wyndham’s are atrocious. There are TWO ladies toilets for the entire stalls/orchestra section. The line was insane. They need to refurbish and until they do, sit on an aisle upstairs.
Also in need of a redo is their box office. For people picking up tickets at will call (literally everyone), there was ONE person at a makeshift podium handling collection. It was so inefficient I wanted to scream. I can’t with this incompetence all over the West End.
 
STAGE DOOR
The Alfreds are probably the nicest people who have ever come out of a stage door. Not the most efficient – there’s no Zachs Braff or Levi-style assured handling of the crowd (they would line everyone up for easy photo-taking or just take your phone and do it themselves, pros) but they were just so freaking nice, not turning anyone’s request down, even when they clearly wanted to leave and some old biddy was asking for them to sign her receipts after they already signed her ticket stubs. I wanted to be like ‘you don’t have to do this you can leave now!’ but they were just the sweetest.