The road ahead Pacific Overtures, Assassins, Road Show BY RICHARD PATTERSON and the American Dream

f Stephen Sondheim is generally considered success is measured not by hard work or merit an apolitical writer, preferring complex hu- but by unrealistic rags-to-riches imagery. In a Iman subjects to lofty sociopolitical ones, world where “the mailman won the lottery” and there are notable exceptions in his three col- “the usherette’s a rock star,” where is the place laborations with book-writer John Weidman, for social and political misfits — immigrants, who, Sondheim has noted, has many political socialists, wannabe ambassadors and racists? and historical interests. Following the October- Integral to this ques- December 2008 run of Road Show at New York’s tioning of America’s Public Theater, I would like to draw comparisons rosy melting-pot spirit among it, Assassins and Pacific Overtures. They is Sondheim’s pastiche reflect and refract one another as a makeshift of the American musical trilogy exploring the American Dream. idiom, utilizing “Hail to This concept is as elusive as its promised the Chief” as a motif and riches. Coined in 1931 by writer-historian James including the barbershop Truslow Adams in Epic of America, the phrase quartet-inspired “Gun itself postdates many of the events in Weidman’s Song.” “How I Saved collaborations with Sondheim. Nevertheless, Ad- Roosevelt,” which appro- ams’ sentiment is a time-honored one, evident priates several insistent throughout American history, beginning with patriotic melodies from the Declaration of Independence’s oft-quoted energetic marches by John promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- Philip Sousa, juxtaposes ness” (perversely echoed in Assassins’ opening citizens’ overzealous pride lyrics, “Everybody’s got the right to be happy,” in saving Franklin D. sung by the assassins and would-be assassins). Roosevelt from assassina- Adams wrote that the American Dream “is tion against the backdrop that dream of a land in which life should be of immigrant Giuseppe better and richer and fuller for everyone. … It Zangara’s strained musi- is not a dream of motor cars and high wages cal plea for understanding. merely, but a dream of social order in which Sondheim acknowledges an each man and woman shall be able to attain the audience’s familiarity with fullest stature of which they are innately capable popular song and turns and be recognized by others for what they are, that brassy, optimistic regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of sound on its head for the birth or position.” purpose of critiquing musi- Though pursuit of personal fulfillment, riches cal clichés. and success is constant, the American Dream The same can be found takes on slightly different shades of meaning in Pacific Overtures when as the concept ebbs and flows with the tide of Sousa-style marches play American politics. President Kennedy’s killer, a role in songs such as Alma Cuervo (in bed) and Michael Cerveris Lee Harvey Oswald, a central character in Assas- “Please Hello” and the (rear, in spotlight) and the company of Road Show by Stephen Sondheim and John sins, would have heard similar dreams upheld in climactic first-act “lion Weidman at The Public Theater the legendary “I Have a Dream” speech deliv- dance.” If Assassins is a ered by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Au- straightforward exploration photo by Joan Marcus gust 1963, just three months before Kennedy’s of the American Dream, assassination. During the lifetime of Lincoln Pacific Overtures (first produced in 1976, assassin John Wilkes Booth, Frederick Douglass America’s Bicentennial) is, in contrast, a work expressed similarly idealistic sentiments, par- centered around a particular moment when the ticularly in his 1859 lecture “Self-Made Men.” United States’ belief in the superiority of the In Assassins, it’s not the pursuit of this American way of life was so strong that the pur- towering dream that informs the piece but the suit of its ideals overreached the confines of our sense that the ideal American life can never be nation’s borders. When the dreams of Americans fully realized, that there’s one national anthem could no longer be contained, the imperialist in the ballpark and another outside “for the tradition of manifest destiny kicked in, giving suckers, for the pikers, for the ones who might way to “civilizing” efforts toward “backward, have been.” The assassins believe that the Amer- ican Dream has been perverted: The pinnacle of continues on page 16

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