This is much darker than I remember it.
Stephen Sondheim’s musical has always been a meditation on the shadowy
underside of the American Dream; it took Sam Mendes’ 1992 Donmar
production, with its expert blend of the underlying bleakness with
self-ironising razzle-dazzle, to get the show recognised as one of the
composer’s finest. Jamie Lloyd’s revival just as consciously eschews
both razzle and dazzle. Soutra Gilmour’s traverse set design of a
dilapidated carnival strung with dim lights sets the tone; when the
figure of the Proprietor emerges from a huge clown’s head to peddle
guns to a collection of assassins and wannabes throughout American
presidential history, he is wearing even more grotesque clown make-up
himself and growls his number rather than crooning it.
This is almost shocking, not because it is not being done “properly”
but because that balance between the Dream and the reality, which has
always seemed to be the work’s thesis, is so out of whack. Gradually,
however, it comes to seem grimly natural. Twenty years on, we see an
America – a world – where the glitter of the Dream, its aspirational
nobility, has perished like an old balloon, leaving only strident
expectation and demand, the naked refrain of “Where’s my prize?” that
punctuates the number “Another National Anthem”. When “Squeaky” Fromme
and John Hinckley Jr (failed assassins of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan
respectively) sing the big romantic duet “Unworthy Of Your Love” to
pictures of their idols, Charles Manson and Jodie Foster, the song now
sounds as hollow as their fixations. Andy Nyman as Charles Guiteau (who
shot James Garfield) no longer charms by cakewalking up the scaffold
singing “I am going to the Lordy”, rather his insane ebullience
unsettles us.
The only seriously flawed note is struck by Catherine Tate as Sara Jane
Moore (another failed Ford gunwoman). Moore is the show’s most
straightforward comic character, but Tate’s considerable talents as a
comedy actor seem now to have subsided into Catherine Tating every role
she is given. It is almost a relief to return to the murky view of a
world in which assassination is now the only viable, perhaps the only
rational, option.
Written for the Financial
Times.