| Unifying
the Plotless Musical:
Sondheim's Assassins
ISAM (Institute
for Studies in American Music) Newsletter
Spring 2000 Volume XXIX, No. 2
by James Lovensheimer
\Stephen
Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins challenges
the ways in which American musicals have been traditionally unified.
Instead of presenting a linear, Aristotelian plot, the musical
is unified through a web of intertextual references.
The network of elements that links the musical’s elements
is dense: familiar music, original music parodying familiar and
popular styles, contemporaneous poems and other writings, original
lyrics and speeches based on those poems and writings, and actual
historical characters who often appear non-chronologically throughout
various time periods. Without the tightly connected use of these
elements, the show would be little more than an anecdotal revue.
Through Sondheim’s and librettist John Weidman’s adroit
and powerful deployment of intertextual references, Assassins
is a highly organized and brilliantly composed unit.
Throughout
Assassins, Sondheim uses the Presidential march
“Hail to the Chief” as a unifying device as well as
a way to emphasize certain scenes. The show opens with the tune
transformed from common time to a 3/4 meter. Through this metric
shift, he ironically connects a march typically associated with
ritual and respect with the act of assassination. Sondheim also
uses “Hail to the Chief” to introduce scenes that
link characters from different time periods, such as that in which
John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley, Leon Czolgosz (assassin of McKinley),
and Giuseppe Zangara (would-be assassin of FDR) all sit around
a New York neighborhood bar. By defamiliarizing the Presidential
march, Sondheim successfully uses it as an emblem of the show’s
across-time bias. Many other songs in Assassins use a version
of the opening motive from “Hail to the Chief” as
Stephen Banfield has noted.1
Other musical
works are directly quoted and often used ironically. Note, for
instance, Sondheim’s use of Sousa’s music to frame
a musical number about an anti-capitalist Zangara. In “How
I Saved Roosevelt,” a suite of dances in 6/8 time, Sondheim
contrasts the familiar and the traditionally American—the
Sousa marches “El Capitan” and “The Washington
Post”—with the Other—an ethnic peasant Tarantella
for the immigrant Zangara. A moment of supreme irony arises when
Zangara begins crying out for photographers at his execution:
“Only capitalists get photographers,” he complains.
At this point his melody and dance change from the Tarantella
to a countermelody of the Sousa march, suggesting Zangara’s
final, albeit momentary, nod to the appeal of capitalist self-promotion.
Using another defamiliarization technique, Sondheim inverts the
opening gesture of the “Star-Spangled Banner” to begin
the refrain of a number titled “Another National Anthem.”
Sondheim’s
incorporation of familiar songs is closely related to his best-known
stylistic trait, the use of pastiche, which is itself a technique
of intertextuality. In Assassins, Sondheim uses
pastiche to maximum effect, employing the familiar vocabulary
and comfortable genres of American popular music to give voice
to disenfranchised and desperate characters from society’s
underside. This is Sondheim’s technique throughout the show:
defamiliarize popular music by putting it in the mouths of those
whose acts we have been taught to deplore, but whose disenfranchisement,
as we begin to see by the show’s end, is just as American
as the comfortable space they inhabit. Popular songs are part
of America’s collective memory: to most Americans, for instance,
“Hail to the Chief ” connotes the importance of the
Executive Branch of the government or the President of the United
States; a Sousa march suggests zealous patriotism. When Sondheim
uses popular song styles to subvert the very meanings they have
borne for a century or more, he is making a drastic stylistic
leap, one that disturbs and unsettles audiences. His use of this
technique to unify Assassins is an ingenious trick.
Contemporary
texts from the periods in which each assassin lived are woven
throughout the musical. For instance, a number sung by Charles
Guiteau, who was executed for assassinating President James Garfield
in 1881, opens with the first lines of a poem he wrote on the
day of his execution. “I am going to the Lordy” is
hymn-like and unaccompanied, and the theme recurs between sections
of the song. After the third section, Sondheim begins to alter
Guiteau’s text. The rest of this number consists of a parlor-waltz
narrative and a cakewalk to which the jaunty Guiteau climbs the
scaffold. The waltz sounds as if it should be played on a harmonium,
and its lyrics are derived from one of several folk songs about
Guiteau. The folk song begins, “Come all ye Christian people,
wherever you may be, / Likewise pay attention to these few lines
from me....” Sondheim switches the speaker from Guiteau
to a Balladeer but nonetheless begins, “Come all ye Christians,
/ And learn from a sinner....” Later, Sondheim conflates
the folk song with Guiteau’s poem: one section, in which
Guiteau swears “I shall be remembered!” comes from
the folk song’s line “But when I’m dead and
buried, you’ll all remember me.” The Balladeer’s
second verse is drawn in part from Guiteau’s final address
to his jury, a meandering diatribe. The third section of the number,
Guiteau’s cakewalk, is an invention of Sondheim’s
that utilizes the upbeat dance form to indicate Guiteau’s
madness alongside his unrelenting optimism that everything he
has done has been for a good cause. The cakewalk, originally a
dance among American plantation slaves in which they mocked their
masters, retains its ironic character as Guiteau sings “Look
on the bright side” on the scaffold, all but momentarily
blind to his fate. This single song, then, combines three popular
song types—the parlor waltz, the cakewalk, and the hymn—with
actual writings of Guiteau and mixes them with Sondheim’s
paraphrasing of Guiteau, a folk song about Guiteau, and Sondheim’s
original lyrics, resulting in a chilling yet somehow amusing portrait
of a lunatic assassin in his last moments.
Perhaps to
connect the idea of a firearm with homespun American values, Sondheim
sets the following lyrics for a barbershop quartet in 3/4 time:
All you have
to do is
Crook your little finger,
Hook your little finger
’Round...
Simply follow through,
And look, your little finger
Can slow them down
To a crawl,
Big and small,
It took a little finger
No time
To change the world.
The song about
Czolgosz is a hoe-down, and the mutually demented John Hinckley
and Squeaky Fromme sing of their unrequited loves—his for
actress Jodie Foster and hers for Charles Manson—to “I’m
Unworthy of Your Love,” a sweet, top 40-style ballad.
The opening
and closing number, “Ev’rybody Has the Right to be
Happy,” is a chirpy soft-shoe, and the John Wilkes Booth
scene presents a combination of ballads, each reflective and touching
while angry and bitter. In short, Sondheim’s musical vocabulary
is vast, and it is organized into a tightly controlled series
of references that propels Assassins.
By exploiting
familiar genres of popular music to explore the desperate actions
of characters from society’s fringes, Sondheim creates a
sense of increasing tension and inevitability that replaces traditional,
forward-looking plot development. Sondheim draws on far more than
simply his audience’s awareness of the relationships of
multiple texts: his use of intertextuality makes it possible to
eschew the usual means of linear plot development while unifying
the unpredictable actions of a disparate cast of characters.
–Ohio State University
Notes
Click on note number to return to its place in the text.
1 Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (University
of Michigan Press, 1993), 57-58.
Back
to Articles
|
