At Last

May 2, 2004

At Last, 9/11 Has Its Own Musical

By FRANK RICH

WHEN I've watched Broadway audiences rise up to cheer even the most idiotic flops over the past decade, I've often wondered: what would it take for them not to give a standing ovation? At last I've found an answer: the fear of terrorists lurking somewhere beyond the lobby.

That is the unnerving sensation that keeps people seated during the otherwise enthusiastic ovation for ''Assassins,'' the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical that returned to New York to much acclaim 10 days ago. At the show's conclusion, its nine title characters, led by John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, form a macabre chorus line and point their guns at the audience. ''Everybody's got the right to their dreams!'' they sing. Then they take aim and shoot. Only a crazy person would stand up to applaud when the same actors take their bows seconds later. We're not at ''Mamma Mia'' anymore.

If the old maxim has it that you should never yell ''Fire!'' in a crowded theater, it's even worse to wave a gun in a crowded theater in New York City at a time when an Associated Press poll shows that two-thirds of Americans expect a terrorist attack before the election, with one-third expecting the political conventions to be a target. At the ''Assassins'' curtain call, all I could think of was what it would be like to be watching this show at the end of August, as the Republicans gather 20 blocks away on the eve of 9/11's third anniversary. By then, we'll also have seen a new take on a classic Hollywood amorality play about the threat of catastrophic political violence -- Jonathan Demme's remake of ''The Manchurian Candidate.'' The 1962 original, uncomfortably enough, was set at a political convention at the old Madison Square Garden, where an assassin programmed by an insidious foreign power (China) plots to throw an American election into chaos. In the new version, starring Denzel Washington and opening on July 30 (a month after we're hoping to turn over ''sovereignty'' in sniper-strewn Iraq), the malevolent title character has been recast as a veteran of the first gulf war.

''Assassins'' was first seen Off Broadway just as Gulf War I was getting under way in January 1991. It received lackluster reviews (one of them by me) and vanished less than a month after its opening. Why has it become Broadway's newest hit in 2004? Though the text has been slightly tweaked, a song added and the production overhauled, it's not the show that has changed so much as the world. The huge difference in response to ''Assassins'' from one war in Iraq to the next is about as empirical an indicator of the larger drift of our post-9/11 culture as can be found.

''U.S. Bombs Kuwait Oil Stations'' was the New York Times headline on the day the reviews came out for the first ''Assassins'' 13 years ago. Just below it on Page 1: ''Fear of Terrorism Is Curbing Travel.'' But ''Assassins'' had no topical traction back then. Those terrorism fears were safely quarantined to terrorism abroad, not at home. The assassins onstage were also unthreatening -- historical curiosities from distant dark ages of American turmoil. In 1991, after all, the country was united behind the hugely popular wartime president, the first George Bush. His approval ratings were in the high 80's and, the war notwithstanding, polls showed that 57 percent of Americans thought the nation was headed in the ''right direction.''

Last week an ABC News/Washington Post poll found quite another America. Now 57 percent of the country says that America is on the ''wrong track.'' The current President Bush, whose approval number hit 48 in a new Pew poll, responds to Americans' fear of new terrorist attacks not with reassurance but by telling the press ''this is a hard country to defend.'' (For all that we've learned about C.I.A., F.B.I. and White House ineptitude before 9/11, we still don't know the extent to which they or the Department of Homeland Security are up to speed now.) Against this grim backdrop, exacerbated further by a permanent war on terrorism that does not resemble the first slamdunk war in Iraq, ''Assassins'' hits much closer to home. In particular, we're more likely to notice two of the assassins who made scant impressions in 1991, even though they had the same lines they do now.

One is Samuel Byck, who, in 1974, became the first person to try to hijack a commercial airliner after weapon detectors had been mandated at American airports 13 months earlier. Byck's assassination plot, thwarted after he had killed two others and shot himself, was to ''drop a 747 on the White House and incinerate Dick Nixon.'' In 1991, Byck, a deluded ranter dressed up in a Santa suit (as was his wont), seemed like a joke. His re-emergence onstage in 2004 -- played by Mario Cantone of ''Sex and the City'' -- seems yet another rebuke to our lax national security during the months and years before 9/11. At the very least, Byck makes you wonder yet again how the current national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, could claim until recently that the very idea of anyone hijacking a commercial plane to use it as a weapon was unthinkable before al Qaeda made a go of it.

The other assassin who made little impact in the first production of ''Assassins'' is Charles Guiteau, who shot James Garfield in a Washington train station in 1881. His show-stopping Sondheim song, delivered with evangelical glee as he mounts a tower of steps to the gallows, is based on a poem, ''I Am Going to the Lordy,'' that the real Guiteau wrote and recited on the day of his execution. Guiteau was a religious zealot who, in the words of The Times 123 years ago, was ''a monomaniac on the second advent of Jesus Christ.'' He once tried to start a newspaper in Hoboken, N.J., called The Daily Theocrat and viewed his suicide mission against an American president as God's will. ''I was just acting for Someone up there,'' he sings as we watch him (in the overwrought performance of Denis O'Hare) march literally and figuratively up to heaven.

Guiteau is so suffused with joy over both his murder of Garfield and his own imminent extinction that you find yourself wondering if he is expecting 72 black-eyed virgins as his posthumous reward. And he is not the only religious fanatic among the assassins. Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, one of two would-be killers of Gerald Ford, was a disciple following the dictates of Charlie Manson, whom she deemed to be the son of God.

A common refrain of the enthusiastic reviews for the new ''Assassins'' attributes its renewed timeliness not so much to these alarming figures as to the rise of ''reality'' shows on TV: some of the assassins wanted to become famous by shooting the most famous Americans of them all. But is that what makes the show so much more disturbing now? Hardly. If ''Assassins'' were merely a satirical parable about our infatuation with celebrity, we could laugh it off -- just as we do the reality shows themselves, which have become a craze precisely because they are devoid of reality and, as such, ideal escapist entertainment to distract us from the reality of the war in Iraq.

The more timely associations evoked by ''Assassins'' in 2004 are not so blithely cordoned off as satire. As Mr. Weidman pointed out in an interview, the assassins in his script, typified by Guiteau and Byck, are often like the young Arab hijackers of 9/11 in their ability to twist their rancid feelings of impotence and humiliation into a ''pseudo-political cause'' that they think justifies their heinous acts. Presidential assassins and al Qaeda often choose their targets similarly as well: occupants of the White House, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are attacked not so much because of who they are but because they embody American power, for which their assailants have a pathological hatred.

''The country is a far less comfortable and complacent place than it was in 1991,'' Mr. Weidman says. It was always his and Mr. Sondheim's intention to knock the audience off balance in the show's opening phrase -- in which a carnival barker at a shooting gallery invites everyone to step right up and ''kill a president.'' But instead of folding their arms across their chests, as theatergoers did at the original ''Assassins,'' audiences are arriving off-balance at the start and are willing to go with it. ''In 1991 it seemed like a cheap trick when the actors pointed their guns at the audience,'' Mr. Weidman adds. ''Now we all feel vulnerable. You feel anything can happen now that we've all become potential targets.''

''Assassins'' is not the only unexpectedly popular piece of culture to claw at this nerve. Half the country thinks the terrorists are winning, according to the AP poll, and so Hollywood revenge fantasies like ''Man on Fire'' and ''The Punisher'' stoke our rage at America's vulnerability to attack. The growing success of HBO's ''Deadwood,'' which vividly recreates the lawlessness of the post-Civil War frontier, is not just post-9/11 but post-''Sopranos'' in its congruence with an America stalked by terrorism; at least the Mafia gives crime a reassuring familial structure that seems somewhat rational next to the anarchy and random violence of the Fallujah-like wild west. In a similar vein, ''Dateline NBC'' scored above-average ratings two weeks ago with its graphic fifth-anniversary return to the terrorism of Columbine. As Dave Cullen wrote in his authoritative article about the Columbine anniversary in Slate, Eric Harris wanted to bomb his high school out of a desire ''to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life.'' In this pseudo-political grandiosity, he is of a piece with Mohamed Atta. We see him far differently now than we did when he was widely (and inaccurately) characterized as a crazed loner striking out at jocks in 1999.

But we see so much differently now. It's almost as if the killers of ''Assassins,'' thriving ''on chaos and despair,'' as one lyric has it, have been lying in wait for 13 years, preparing for just the right moment to leap out of the shadows. In this instance, there's scant cheer in observing that artists often possess the prescience that the rest of us do not.