Assassination Complex

By the way, in case you’re in town here and looking for a good show, I ought to mention Assassins, put on by the Sight Unseen Theatre Group at the Meta Theatre. I saw it with a group of friends on Saturday night and it was excellent. (Friends mostly from a rowing club, go figure. Not a grouping I expected to meet in LA…No, I don’t row, I met them at a party the previous week.) A Stephen Sondheim musical (very clever songs and lyrics therefore), with excellent direction and performances, based on the book by John Weidman. They’re going to be done by the end of the week, so move fast.

The various assassins and would-be assassins of various US presidents, assembled together, with guns, song and (a bit of) dance.

I really enjoyed it. There’s something to be said for doing an examination of aspects of the national psyche by assembling all the assassins and would-be assassins of US presidents through the ages and having them as characters in a musical. Brilliant. The Meta is a wonderfully tiny theatre of 60 seats, with a stage hardly bigger than a domestic living room. (There are lots of theatres in LA like this… remind me to tell you about the whole 99-seat theatre thing sometime…) The space is inevitably intimate, and the director Cindy Jenkins had to use the stage very creatively in order for things to work well (especially with so many actors and hardly any props). She did, and they did. The music (directed by Andy Mitton) was excellent too. Above right: Michael Laurino as John Wilkes Booth and Jason Decker as Leon Czolgosz.

Another bonus of the evening? A new pub/bar finding. The Village Idiot on Melrose. We went there to toast one of the actors, Michael Laurino (husband of one of our crew, so to speak… he played -excellently- one of the central characters – John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin). It had Hendricks, so other things about it (like being a bit too glitzy to be a pub really) can be forgiven.

I shamelessly borrowed the above pictures from a review by Haya Zoubi here.

-cvj