Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater by Nina Penner

Author:Nina Penner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253052421
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Example 5.20. Shifting meters in “The Ballad of Booth”

Sondheim’s references to musical Americana claim these individuals as American, but his deviations from the conventions of the styles he invokes indicate that they are decidedly wayward citizens. Their problems—dead-end jobs, unrequited love, chronic pain—may be ordinary, but their solutions are not.

Sondheim and Weidman certainly align us with the assassins’ points of view, but do they encourage us to ally ourselves with them?81 Weidman claims that he and Sondheim “don’t ask the audience to sympathize with these characters. We don’t ask the audience even to empathize with them. We simply ask them to see them as more multi-dimensional and complicated than they are if we simply see them as a group of murderers.”82 Sondheim and Weidman do invite sympathy for at least some of the assassins, despite Weidman’s protests to the contrary. As other critics have remarked, Czolgosz is a particularly sympathetic character.83 He is forced to work in unsafe conditions because, as the son of Polish immigrants, he is unable to find better employment. It is easy to sympathize with Czolgosz not only because of the injustices he faced but also because of the way Sondheim and Weidman tell his story. His scene with the political activist Emma Goldman (Scene 5) is, in Weidman’s description, “as close to a naturalistic scene as there is in the piece.” Weidman characterizes it as “sentimental” and intended it to be “played very warmly.”84 By contrast, the following scene involving Fromme and Sara Jane Moore takes its inspiration from sitcoms like I Love Lucy (1951–57), inviting audiences to laugh at the characters’ expense.

That the assassins’ stories are largely communicated through song also facilitates a degree of emotional attunement or empathy with the characters. I feel anger on Czolgosz’s behalf when I contemplate the prejudice he faced and how even contemporary America is far from its putative ideal as a land of equal opportunity. What I do not share, and what the work does not encourage me to share, is Czolgosz’s conviction that shooting the president is a reasonable response to his situation or one that is likely to improve working conditions or the treatment of immigrants in American society. I take Weidman’s denial that the work encourages sympathy or empathy as a denial that it encourages unqualified allegiance with the assassins. To the extent that the work encourages sympathy or empathy for them, it is not because they commit (or attempt to commit) murder but in spite of these actions and intentions.85

Even so, many American critics have accused Sondheim and Weidman of failing to offer a clear moral point of view. Knapp has argued that, with the removal of the Balladeer’s “normalising reassurances” in “Another National Anthem,” “the audience is left . . . virtually defenceless against the assassins’ twisted perspective.” Knapp assumes too passive a role for the audience. Assassins is not a show for nursery school children but one for adults, who are not likely to question their belief that murder is wrong without a “perspective of health with which [to] identify.

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