AMERICA’S DARKEST CARNIVAL BARKS TO LIFE

Revolution Stage Company delivers powerhouse vocals and sharp design in
Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s unsettling musical revue.

Revolution Stage Company has become one of my favorite local theatre companies, and its current production of Assassins (score: Stephen Sondheim, book: John Weidman) features one of the most uniformly talented casts that I have seen in quite a while. This was my first time to view this show, and I was a little baffled by the structure—but in full disclosure, I didn’t appreciate a couple of Sondheim shows when I first saw them. Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music have now become a couple of my favorites. I suspect that Assassins won’t, but this production has so much going for it that it merits a visit.

The characters include assassins (or would-be’s): John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Nannini), Lincoln’s assassin; Leon Czolgosz (Don Kelley), who assassinated President William McKinley; Charles Guiteau (Fuz Edwards), who assassinated President James A. Garfield; Giuseppe Zangara (Marcello Tulipano), who attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt (but killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead); Squeaky Fromme (Nicole Kennedy) and Sara Jane Moore (Heather Joy), who both attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford; John Hinckley Jr. (Alfredo Bazua), who tried to impress the actress Jodie Foster by taking a shot at Ronald Reagan; Samuel Byck (Michael Hamlin), who plotted to assassinate Richard Nixon by hijacking a plane; and Lee Harvey Oswald (C. James Slaybaugh), President John F. Kennedy’s assassin—some of them successful, some of them failures, and all of them unforgettable in the worst way.

The first thing to understand is that Assassins doesn’t celebrate or glorify these people. It doesn’t invite us to admire them—it invites us to think about them. The show becomes a kind of unsettling meditation on how their dreams, their grievances, and their urge to “pull the trigger” were shaped, fed, and nurtured by American culture itself, and by the cracks in our less-than-perfect union. One lyric states, “Every now and then the country goes a little wrong.” It’s a point that, ahem, always rings true.

Structurally, the show unfolds more like a musical revue than a traditional musical, with a dark carnival vibe that borders on semi-burlesque. The Proprietor (L. T. Cousineau) sets the evening in motion, guiding this gallery of would-be murderers and reminding them that “Everybody’s got a right to their dreams”—even when those dreams turn deadly. Sondheim’s score is often hummable, and the songs cleverly echo the musical styles of the different eras the characters come from, which makes the whole thing feel both historically grounded and eerily familiar.

The show starts with footage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and then switches into its carnival world, where The Proprietor sells guns to the characters who will eventually attempt to kill a president. The first is Booth, and Anthony Nannini once again takes ownership of the stage with his singing and acting. I have commented before about his “eye acting”—without moving his head he can move his eyes to one side or the other, and they are visible from the audience and speak volumes. He can similarly twitch one or both of his eyebrows and somehow they seem to say everything.

During the Booth segment we are introduced to The Balladeer (Imani De Leon), who challenges Booth’s motives. Did he really kill Lincoln because of his political views, or was it because he received bad reviews for his acting? The role, normally played by a man (most notably Neil Patrick Harris), but De Leon is a delight, packing plenty of punch into her musical narration.

With such a uniformly high standard of performers, it’s hard to pick out individual moments, but a couple that have lingered with me include L. T. Cousineau as the snake-oily Proprietor. His “Everybody’s Got the Right (To Be Happy)” is funny because of his gaudy checkered suit and song-and-dance delivery, but at the same moment terrifying since killing the president is high on the list of mortal sins. That sets the tone for much of what follows.

Also noteworthy is Fuz Edwards as Guiteau, whose voice is hauntingly sweet on “I Am Going to the Lordy,” and Marcello Tulipano as Zangara, who sings with an operatic range and control. Local theatre veteran Don Kelley conquers the task of making an unassuming character captivating, and Michael Hamlin tackles lengthy monologues as he envisions killing Richard Nixon. Much-needed comic relief comes from scenes between Heather Joy as Sara Jane Moore and Nicole Kennedy as Squeaky Fromme. Squeaky envisions herself as the future bride of “God,” which is how she views Charles Manson, and the vacuous dialogue between the two ladies—complete with guns and KFC—is hilarious.

Nathan Cox’s video design, Rebecca McWilliams’ costumes, and Ben Core’s lighting are all effective at keeping us aware of the times and places. Since there are numerous locations that switch quickly, Joyanne Tracy’s set design consists of fixed spiral staircases attached to each proscenium and a collection of painted crates of various sizes. They are moved with choreographed precision by the actors in the blackouts. At intermission, all of them are piled in two stacks upstage. When an actor returned one of those crates to the stack in the dark, another actor quickly came out and turned the crate upside down. I thought, “Boy, this is really picky,” until the last scene, when the two stacks are turned around and painted as the Texas School Book Depository for the dramatic finale where the ghosts of all the previous assassins talk Lee Harvey Oswald into doing what we all know he did.

Revolution Stage Company’s Assassins is one striking scene after another, with voices, acting, and technical elements that are uniformly terrific. It is only when we try to sort the pieces into some sort of coherent narrative that problems arise. If the show itself remains strange—by subject matter and by structure—this production still manages to make it compelling, unsettling, and memorable.

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photos courtesy of RSC

Assassins
Revolution Stage Company
611 S Palm Canyon Dr. in Palm Springs
two hours with intermission
ends on January 31, 2026
for tickets ($33-$49), visit Revolution

remaining performances:
Fri, Jan 23, 2026 • 7:00 pm
Sat, Jan 24, 2026 • 8:00 pm
Tue, Jan 27, 2026 • 7:00 pm
Wed, Jan 28, 2026 • 7:00 pm
Thu, Jan 29, 2026 • 7:00 pm
Fri, Jan 30, 2026 • 7:00 pm
Sat, Jan 31, 2026 • 8:00 pm

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