The evening begins with “Hail To The Chief”
– not in its familiar stirringly patriotic certainty, but eerily arranged
for a carnival calliope, and not to announce the entrance of the President
but of his would-be assassins. We are at a fairground, in front of a shooting
gallery which boasts a unique entertainment: “Shoot the President – win
a Prize”. As the Proprietor ballyhoos his sideshow, eight figures come
forward one by one to chance their luck, assassins drawn from over a century
of American history. They are a disparate group, one dressed in a 19th
century frock coat, another as a department store Santa. But each is handed
his own distinctive gun – the preferred means of ultimate political protest
in the United States. “EVERYBODY’S GOT THE RIGHT to be happy”, the Proprietor
asserts. Everybody’s got the right to their dreams: isn’t that the American
way?
The last to arrive is John Wilkes Booth, who promptly
uses his newly-acquired weapon on President Lincoln. As the fatal shots
ring out, the Balladeer steps out to sing THE BALLAD OF BOOTH – “a handsome
devil who decided to take his bad reviews out on his Chief of State. Holed
up in a tobacco barn with his confederate David Herold, Booth is determined
to set down his version of events: he’s not a common cut-throat, not a
madman, but someone who did what he did for his country, who slew a tyrant
– as Brutus did. But, even as Booth dies, the Balladeer’s banjo ballad
returns to point out that, thanks to him, Lincoln, who’d hitherto received
mixed reviews, now gets only raves.
The other assassins are in a bar. “Has Nixon been in?”
asks Samuel Byck, still wearing his Santa suit. But it seems not. Booth
is back, though, just in time to hear Giuseppe Zangara complaining about
how nothing seems to relieve the pain in his stomach. Booth suggests shooting
FDR. “Will it help?” asks Zangara. But Zangara’s attempt misfires and
he kills, instead, Mayor Cermak of Chicago. Grouped around the radio microphones
in Miami’s Bayfront Park, a handful of bystanders boast, over the strains
of a Sousa march, of “HOW 1 SAVED ROOSEVELT”, while, strapped into the
electric chair, Zangara insists he is not left or right, only an “American
nothing”. The song ends as the current is switched on.
Forty years later, in the mid-Seventies, Sara Jane Moore
and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme meet up over a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken,
discuss the evils of fast food and end up taking pot shots at the graven
image of Colonel Sanders. Neither is very good with a gun, but at least
they have one. “It takes a lot of men to make a gun,” says Leon Czolgosz,
a lumbering glass-factory worker contemplating the significance and power
of his weapon. In THE GUN SONG, Czolgosz, Moore, Booth and Charles Guiteau
identify, in barbershop harmonies, the advantages of firearms: all you
have to do is move your little finger and you can change the world. The
others wander off, leaving Czolgosz alone to consider what he should do.
He is an admirer of the anarchist agitator Emma Goldman and, after one
of her meetings, she suggested that he might like to visit the 1901 Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo. He does, and the Balladeer takes up the story in
THE BALLAD OF CZOLGOSZ. As President McKinley shakes hands with visitors
to the Exposition, Czolgosz wraps his gun in a handkerchief, joins the
President’s excited admirers and kills Big Bill. 1n the USA, you can work
your way to the head of the line”.
Back to the Seventies: Samuel Byck, an out-of-work tyre
salesman, has hatched a bold scheme to kill President Nixon and is explaining
it, via his cassette machine, to Leonard Bernstein, the busy conductor
and composer. “Maybe if you can’t listen now,” suggests Byck, aware of
the pressures on the maestro’s time, “you can listen ‘Tonight, tonight
. . .’ 1 love that song”. His message completed, he leaves singing “Everything’s
great in America . . .”
John Hinckley also enjoys singing, but only his own compositions,
angrily accompanied on his acoustic guitar. “I am UNWORTHY OF YOUR LOVE”,
he admits in an overwrought ballad addressed to his “girlfriend”, Jodie
Foster. Lynette Fromme watches and then delivers her own version of the
number, addressed to her lover (and the new Messiah) Charles Manson. But
Hinckley blows his opportunity to prove his worthiness to Jodie when he
starts shooting unsuccessfully at a photo of President Reagan that is
projected on to the back wall. The President just keeps wisecracking his
way through the bullets – and, hey, where’d that guy learn to shoot anyway?
The Russian army?
Charles Guiteau has better luck. In 1881, he meets President
Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac station in Washington and asks to
be made Ambassador to France. Garfield ignores him and is fatally shot
in the back. Failed lawyer, preacher, politician and author, Garfield’s
killer is looking forward to being an angel and, in THE BALLAD OF GUITEAU
(I AM GOING TO THE LORDY), cakewalks up and down the gallows steps with
irrepressible cheerfulness.
Before his assassination of Garfield and execution, Guiteau
had given Sara Jane Moore some lessons in how to shoot up her Kentucky
Fried Chicken more accurately. But they don’t seem to have paid off. Trying
now to shoot President Ford, she kills her dog instead. And she got all
her dates mixed up, so she had to bring the kid along and he’s screaming
for an ice-cream and Lynette is screaming at her for bring the kid and
the dog to an assassination. “Look, we came here to kill the President”,
shrieks Moore. “Let’s just kill him and go home”. Enter President Ford,
who trips on the bullets she’s dropped, very considerately hands them
back to her and proceeds on his way as Moore and Fromme pull their triggers
helplessly behind him.
After Sam Byck’s abortive mission to crash an airliner
into the White House, he and the seven other assassins come together to
explain their motives: one did it to avenge the ravaged South, another
so her friends would know where she was coming from. Now, they want their
prizes. For the first time, they are no longer freakish, embittered, angry
individuals but a group with a common purpose, marching to ANOTHER NATIONAL
ANTHEM – not the one you cheer at the ballpark, but the anthem of those
who can’t get in. As the march dies away, the Blue Ridge Boys play Heartache
Serenade, and we’re listening to a transistor radio in the sixth floor
storeroom of the Texas School Book Depository on 22 November 1963. On
the verge of taking his own life, Lee Harvey Oswald is interrupted by
Booth and the other assassins, and invited instead to make history. The
assassins who preceded Oswald say he will bring them back; those who came
after him say he will make them possible, by once again making assassinations
a part of the American experience. His act can give them historical power
as a united force, not as a bunch of isolated “nuts”. Oswald refuses and
Booth entices him with the statement that when Hinckley’s room is searched
after his assassination attempt on President Reagan, every book written
about Oswald will be found. Through the window, flags are flying, bands
are marching to patriotic tunes, the President’s motorcade is about to
pass by the cheering crowds. 1n here, this is America, too”, says Booth
– the land where any kid can grow up to be President, or grow up to kill
a President. Oswald picks up his gun and moves to the window. As President
Kennedy dies, his assassin takes his place among his confreres in the
last empty booth at the carnival. He has brought them back, he has made
them possible, and, for those ordinary Americans, who’ll always remember
where they were when they heard the news, SOMETHING JUST BROKE. Their
despair stands in quiet contrast to the jaunty reprise of their theme,
EVERYBODY’S GOT THE RIGHT … to their dreams. And, as in all the happy
endings in all the best musicals, your dream can come true if you just
go out and get it.