Casting "Assassins"

I went down to the South End and caught Company One's production of the rarely-staged Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins" the other day. Excellent work; all it needs is a bigger orchestra to fill out the sound. It plays until August 9th and is well worth catching; here's my colleague Louise Kennedy's review, and here's a Globe piece on the controversy over its appearance in an election year. (But, then, controversy has dogged this play since its 1990 off-Broadway debut -- it never did make it to the Great White Way back then, and I admit the notion of tourists paying top dollar for a toe-tapping show about America's very darkest urges is difficult to picture, despite a 2004 revival that ran for 101 performances.)

No, watching this show will not make you want to go out and kill a president. On the contrary, what Sondheim and book author John Weidman are up to here is shining a light on how the all-American dreams of fame and success can get warped by lost souls; how powerlessness and rage can lash out at the biggest symbol at hand; how infamy can be just as good as celebrity to a twisted mind. "Assassins" is a play about delusion: Jeff Mahoney's Charles J. Guiteau -- a part-time evangelist who shot President James Garfield in 1881 -- is a charming chap who only gradually reveals the bottomless depths of his hatred of humanity.

Rough, confrontational stuff, and only slightly ameliorated by the brilliance of Sondheim's musical thinking: Each assassin's central number is composed in the style of the time period in which they lived. Minstrel banjo and Civil War strings for John Wilkes Booth (David Da Costa), whistle-stop brass band for FDR's would-be killer Giuseppe Zangara (Blake Pfeil). Etc. When John Hinckley (Nathanael Shea) and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (McCaela Donovan) sing a goopy 70s love duet called "Unworthy of Your Love," the creepiest part is that they're not singing it to each other but to, respectively, Jodie Foster and Charles Manson.

I still think the climactic scene in which Lee Harvey Oswald (Jonathan Popp) is goaded by the others to pick up that rifle is far too glib and thus tasteless in a way the rest of the show deftly avoids. But "Assassins" deals in issues that won't go away, even when they're not crystallized by a madman with a gun.

This is a movie column, though, and I'm talking about a stageplay. So how about casting "Assassins" for the film version that will never, ever get made? If that doesn't take the show's loser-as-celebrity gamesmanship to another level, I don't know what does. Shall we begin?

Johnny Depp for John Wilkes Booth: Depp's shown that he can sing -- and sing Sondheim -- and he mustered up the requisite homicidal madness as Sweeney Todd.

Edward Norton for Lee Harvey Oswald. (Honorable mention to estimable colleague Mark Feeney for suggesting young Kevin Costner. Too handsome, says I.)

Character actress Margo Martindale for Sara Jane Moore.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Charles J. Guiteau

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Giuseppe Zangara. The former wrestler says he wants to stretch, doesn't he?

Daniel Craig as William McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz

Ellen Page as Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme

John Hinckley was already playing Robert De Niro in his head when he tried to kill Ronald Reagan. Best punishment, then, is casting De Niro himself -- fat, old De Niro circa 2008. Estimable colleague Feeney says Jack Black would be a better bet but I don't really feel like giving Hinckley the satisfaction.