Three and a half weeks of rehearsal is not enough time to stage a Stephen Sondheim musical.

At least, it wasn’t enough for Columbia College’s production of “Assassins” on March 24–26 at Launer Auditorium.

“Assassins” tells the story of every person who has tried to kill a U.S. president, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. The show introduces the audience to the more infamous “assassins” like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as those that few people know about, like Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley.

It takes place in a carnival, where every “assassin” gathers to talk about their lives before their attempt, while the proprietor of the carnival sells them chances to shoot a president in one of his games.

As soon as I saw the set on stage, my hopes for the production were instantly raised. It looked like a real carnival, complete with flashing light bulbs and patriotic bunting, colored red, white and blue.

The show opens with a small band playing music characteristic of a county fair. Only a couple minutes into the opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right,” the proprietor had to skip a few lines of lyrics.

This would soon become a running theme throughout the production.

Sondheim’s music is some of the most complicated, especially lyrically, in the entire musical theatre canon.

“Everybody’s Got the Right” is far from the most lyrically difficult of the “Assassins” score, yet it still contains lines like: “Hey, fella/Feel like you’re a failure?/Bailiff on your tail? Your/Wife run off for good?”

Throughout the entire hour and 45 minute show, only two songs remained unscathed by the scourge of forgotten lyrics: “Unworthy of Your Love,” a gentle duet in which John Hinckley and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme sing of their love of Jodie Foster and Charles Manson, respectively, as motivation for murder, and “Something Just Broke,” an ensemble piece about how the citizens of the U.S. feel when their president is suddenly gone.

I wasn’t surprised to hear the cast miss so many of these complicated lyrics, but I was shocked to read in the program that the production had been in rehearsal for less than a month.

Columbia College’s “Assassins” could have been fantastic, given another two weeks of practice.

The show was well cast, the costumes were great, and all of the scenes in between musical numbers were well done.

Most impressive to me was the live band, which was able to quickly adapt to all of the lyrics that were skipped over or muddled by the actors. If I hadn’t been familiar with the score going in, I might not have noticed half the mistakes that were being made.

Despite all of the missteps made by Columbia College, my misgivings about this particular production can’t change the fact that “Assassins” is a remarkable show. It’s often considered the height of nonlinear storytelling in musical theater and one of Sondheim’s greatest works for a good reason.

“Assassins” exposes the hidden sentiment of a portion of the U.S. population that can only find a voice in such loud and terrifying statements as killing a president.

In “Take a Look, Lee,” one of the final scenes of the show, all of the “assassins,” led by John Wilkes Booth, convince Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President John F. Kennedy moments before his motorcade will pass the window where he is sitting.

“But in here, this is America, too. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’” Booth says to Oswald. “An American said that. And he was right. But there are no lives of quiet desperation here. Desperation, yes. But quiet? I don’t think so.”

They want Oswald to be the one to “sum it all up and blow it all open.” They want to return to the minds of Americans through his act.

Obviously, they succeed.

No matter the caliber of the specific production, there will always be something to get out of seeing “Assassins.”

_Edited by Katherine Rosso | krosso@themaneater.com_