“Everybody’s Got The Right To Be Happy”

I saw the new revival of Assassins on January 6th, the first anniversary of the Capitol attack.

“Place your bets,” said my friend as we sat down. “Will they make a speech before or after the show?” There had to be a speech, right? Assassins is a musical about political violence – specifically, the real men and women who (successfully or not) tried to kill an American President. We were seeing it a year to the day after hundreds of people smashed into the US Capitol, shouting “Hang Mike Pence” and “Shoot the politicians”, waving Confederate flags, erecting a makeshift gallows.

How could there not be a speech?

The opening of the show sees the assassins united in a mystic carnival. There’s Leon Czolgosz, the working-class anarchist. Giuseppe Zangara, who suffers debilitating stomach pain. Charles Guiteau, the genteel narcissist trying to promote his book. Samuel Byck, dressed in a ridiculous Santa Claus outfit. John Hinckley Jr., in love with Jodie Foster. Squeaky Fromme, in love with Charles Manson. Sara Jane Moore, fidgety and useless.

The Proprietor invites them all to participate in a game of “Shoot a Prez, Win a Prize”, luring them in with the seductive lyric:

Everybody’s got the right to be happy.

Who could disagree with that? Soon each of the assassins is ominously carrying a loaded gun, bustling in line to take pot-shots at a metal target of a President... and then John Wilkes Booth arrives. Handsome, racist and poised, he leads them all in a climactic chorus, raises his gun, and, with a cry of “Sic semper tyrannis”, murders Abraham Lincoln.

(“Sic semper tyrannis”, or “Thus always to tyrants”: the words Brutus supposedly spoke before stabbing Caesar. Not so far away from “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung”: the words posted on Parler by Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader, before hundreds of people marched through the Capitol chanting “Where the fuck is Nancy?”)

The CSC production was terrific. They staged the musical in the round; I could see my fellow audience members as much as the actors. The stage was a huge American flag (forever being trampled underfoot). The assassins frequently wore stars-and-stripes facemasks; they were patriots, they were gangsters, death was in the air they breathed.

And the guns were very obviously fake.

That’s not to say they were unrealistic; they looked superficially real, they seemed period- appropriate. But they didn’t make a flash or even a noise when fired. There was just a (muffled?) sound effect played through the speakers. The director seemed to be saying, “Don’t worry, these aren’t real guns, just props – and obvious ones at that.”

It wasn’t hard to understand why. Alec Baldwin had accidentally killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun less than three months previously. There were 34 school shootings in 2021. Guns, especially in America, especially to my pinko European sensibilities, have a viscerally nasty resonance.

Still, the overall effect was fascinating. The guns-as-props were telling us not to fear them. The guns-as-symbols were telling us to be very afraid.

I think it’s a microcosm of a central paradox in the overall musical. It simultaneously asks us to condemn the assassins, and not to condemn them. John Weidman, the brilliant bookwriter, once wrote:

“Assassins suggests that while these individuals are, to say the least, peculiar – taken as a group they are peculiarly American. And that behind the variety of motives which they articulated for their murderous outbursts, they share a common purpose: a desperate desire to reconcile feelings of impotence with an inflamed and malignant sense of entitlement.”

Impotent? Certainly. Entitled? Yes and no. Isn’t Zangara entitled not to live with debilitating pain? Doesn’t Czolgosz have grounds when he describes the horrifying conditions of steelwork? Isn’t Lee Harvey Oswald portrayed as a victim of mind-bending depression rather than inflamed entitlement?

None of this is an excuse for killing a President. Assassins examines the warped line of logic that argues otherwise.

Consequently, John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim were forever batting away accusations of glorifying murder. But I can’t help feeling that, while it’s convenient to dismiss the assassins as morally subhuman, that’s a little untrue to the show. For me, the show isn’t a meditation on American entitlement. It’s a warning about how quickly and easily powerlessness can turn into bloodshed – especially when people can’t agree on what’s true, especially when they’re lied to.

Or half-lied to. Or given false hope. Here we see Sondheim’s genius in the Proprietor’s seductive lyric. The Declaration of Independence holds that everybody has the inalienable right to pursue happiness. The Proprietor holds that everybody’s got the right to be happy. Assassins exists in the difference between those two ideas.

You can see the reasoning. If I’ve got the right to be happy but I’m miserable, then someone, somewhere, is screwing me. And if they’re screwing me, then hell, maybe I have the right to screw them. Who are they specifically? I dunno – but if I kill the Big Man, I become the Big Man.

Another message of Assassins: political violence is almost never about policy. It’s about power.

The Capitol riot broke out because Trump was about to lose the Presidency. He’d been defeated by seven million votes in the election. Every court – often headed by Trump- appointed judges – had thrown out his appeals as groundless. But as the mob swarmed throught the Capitol, almost all of them white, they chanted: “Whose house? Our house!” Trump had told them: “You’ll never take the country back with weakness.” The rioters saw themselves not simply as claiming power, but reclaiming power – power, they felt, that was rightfully theirs.

In their own twisted way, the rioters and the assassins fundamentally want what most of us want: comfort, justice, dignity, esteem, attention. Assassins seeks to understand how such motives can become murderous. Doesn’t it therefore give these terrorists exactly what they want – the oxygen of attention? Is this just another example of us glorifying a particular kind of bitter (mostly male) psyche?

Perhaps. But onstage, a gun can be harmless and terrifying. A character can be vicious and pitiful. Theatre is as contradictory as life itself. You watch it, you see all sides, you come away somehow confused and a little more clear-minded. It shouldn’t simply tell you what to think.

Nobody made a speech when the show was over.