A song lyric, from the musical we saw last night.
(2 more performances, tonight and tomorrow. Buy tickets here.)
ADDED: As I was playing the song at the link — "Another National Anthem" from "Assassins" — Meade said: "What is that, 'South Park'?" And he saw the play last night! I said, "Yeah, it does sound like 'South Park.' Now you know where 'South Park' gets its inspiration.'"
AND: From a review in yesterday's NYT of a production of "Assassins" in London:
Some are fired by political ideals, like the magnetic John Wilkes Booth... the naïve anarchist Leon Czolgosz... the Depression-era firebrand Giuseppe Zangara... and the failed Communist Lee Harvey Oswald... taunted into taking his fatal shots by the commanding ghost of Booth.
Others are narcotized by the cult of celebrity: the sniveling John Hinckley... clutching his tattered photo of Jodie Foster as if it were a religious relic, or the sweat-begrimed Samuel Byck... ranting with grim earnestness into the tape recorder hanging around his neck, composing an urgent bulletin for Leonard Bernstein. (A reeling snatch of “America,” from “West Side Story,” is heard.)
And then there are the lost souls like Charles Guiteau... outraged when he was denied a job at the White House of President James A. Garfield; Lynette Fromme, a.k.a. Squeaky, a frail flower child... whose perorations on Charles Manson are delivered with the moist-eyed innocence of a teenager mooning over a boy-band member; and her companion in delusion, the much-married, dithery and unhinged Sara Jane Moore....
Posts
13 comments:
Song List from the Musical Play "Manson":
'(I Just Met a Man Named) Charlie'
'Spahn Ranch (Let's Get Groovy in the Desert)'
'You Are All My Children / Let's Fuck (Charlie's Theme)'
'I'm Not Crazy Eyes, I'm In Love (Squeaky's Theme)'
'Something Witchy (Girls' Night Out With Tex)'
'I Want To Live (Sharon Tate's Theme)'
'Pigs (Forks and Steak Knives)'
'I'm Not Crazy Eyes Reprise / The Beatles Played Backwards'
'X-tasy (Let's Carve Our Foreheads For Charlie)'
'Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares'
'You Are All My Children Reprise / The Devil Always Has a Bald Head'
I am Laslo.
Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't a "failed Communist," he was a Communist failure. A redundancy, I know.
"the failed Communist Lee Harvey Oswald... taunted into taking his fatal shots by the commanding ghost of Booth."
More bullshit. He's making it up.
I have used Squeaky Fromme's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Ford as a teaching tool when instructing novice shooters how to load and unload semiautomatic pistols.
As to South Park music: the big fat chicken that is South Park likely laid the egg that is the music heard at this more recent production. Not the other way 'round. Which came first is easy here.
"The yearning [for assassins] to inscribe their names in the history books — to be somebody — that drives so many of the would-be assassins feels like an ever more delusional wish in our era of a rapidly widening economic divide."
From assassins seeking fame to economic divide.
You cannot parody the NY Times.
"...the failed Communist Lee Harvey Oswald"
Not to be too pedantic but Oswald would get a bit upset - he was a successful jerk after all - when asked it he was a Communist. He insisted he was a Marxist not a Communist (and certainly not a Marxist-Leninist!) and he would roll his eyes when people asked about the difference.
His brother Robert (a fine man), explained it: "If Lee had stayed in the Soviet Union he would have ended up shooting Khrushchev."
When Oswald shot JFK he was essentially shooting himself. Nihilism and a desire for fame or to change history likely drove him to act more than Marxism did.
"More bullshit. He's making it up."
No, that's a true statement of what happens in the play.
"As to South Park music: the big fat chicken that is South Park likely laid the egg that is the music heard at this more recent production. Not the other way 'round. Which came first is easy here."
You're wrong. The musical "Assassins" came out in 1990. The music and lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim, who had has been working on musicals since the 1950s. I think it's pretty darned safe to say that Sondheim influenced South Park and not the other way around.
South Park began in 1997.
One of my favorite musicals. I was fortunate enough to have performed two productions of it. "Another National Anthem" is still my favorite song from the show, although "The Gun Song" is also excellent.
One of the productions I was involved in had Beck "riding" a gun suspended about 20 feet above the stage down to stage level. The set designer based this on imagery from Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rode the bomb to his death.
We also had a "real" hanging for Guiteau. The actor had to wear a harness underneath his costume, and there was this series of checks that we had to go through every night in order for the trapdoor to actually open underneath him. The actor was a bit freaked out by the whole thing, of course -- he was suspended about 15 feet above the stage!
One of Sondheim's greatest shows.
The review says that "landing a fulfilling middle-class job seems like a lottery win, and gun violence born of desperation an ever more prevalent blight." Somehow (I don't know why) this comes across as an attempt to -- if not justify at least normalize -- the assassins. I'm not sure in what Golden Age middle-class jobs were fulfilling, and what evidence is there that "gun violence born of desperation" is growing?
Cheery Tune.
Perfectly post-modern. Everyone's viewpoint is valid.
Blah.
Attempted assassins should not be in a show titled Assassins.
Post a Comment