The choice of the Stephen Sondheim work Assassins to relaunch Cape Town's iconic struggle venue The Space in Long Street - now the NewSpace Theatre - is as controversial as Assassins itself.
How appropriate, you might wonder, is an American musical for a theatre whose opening drama 36 years ago was Athol Fugard's Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act? And whose 300 later productions included the defiant, uniquely SA likes of Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and Othello Slegs Blankes, often performed with the theatre doors locked?
Assassins' cast - Dazzling the mind while raising serious questions
But even if the NewSpace Theatre's artistic directors Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer could have staged Fugard's newest play Coming Home - and they couldn't, because its SA premiere is at the Baxter in April - they would probably have opted for Assassins anyway.Not only is a Sondheim production a major event of the kind that an occasion like this merits. Assassins also happens to be horribly relevant right now, with the election of Obama and the fear uppermost in everyone's minds that some idiot will have a go at him.
Assassins is not your normal clichéd Broadway musical fare. But Sondheim is not your normal Broadway maverick. Who else could put cannibalism on the stage (Sweeney Todd)? He's always had an original, cerebral, sardonic take on life, and this multi textured musical experience is no exception, full of dark humour, horrific yet hilarious, dazzling the mind while raising serious questions.
What is it about the American psyche and the American dream that makes Americans keep trying to kill their presidents? It happens in no other developed countries. Yet in the US there have been 13 assassination attempts, four of them successful. You know about the killing of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, but did you know about James Garfield and William McKinley?
In a fast-paced analysis via songs and dialogue, across 150 years of American history, Sondheim and his librettist John Weidman examine each of the 13 attempts in detail. They see a common thread: all these loners and loonies need someone to blame for the fact that the American dream has passed them by.
Abrahamse's 15-strong cast all do justice to the real-life characters. They handle Sondheim's trademark insightful, witty lyrics with skill, in spite of being handicapped with fake accents.
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The astoundingly versatile Anthea Thompson is convincingly batty as Sara Jane Moore, the counterculture freak who tried to shoot Gerald Ford - "There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun." David Dennis gives another finely tuned performance as a gallant Charles Guiteau, the nutty lawyer who killed James Garfield because he wouldn't appoint him ambassador to France. And Marcel Meyer makes a mellifluous, moustachioed John Wilkes Booth, the 27-year-old actor who shot Lincoln at the theatre.
What pulls the whole structure together, of course, is Sondheim's music. His famously complex compositions are performed here on stage by a trio of hard-working musicians tucked away in a high corner. It's a set design that's as inspired as the rest of this plush little revamp, which is air-conditioned and has 180 steeply raked seats for clear viewing.
With a balcony overlooking Long Street, and a pizzeria and ice-cream emporium on the ground floor, this mini precinct is set to become a hot spot.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
