Assassins was, at least at the time, a reasonably perverse idea for a musical...the musical history of the US presidential assassins. One of the theaters for which I designed sound announced that Assassins would be part of their season. I was delighted.
The director let us do what we wanted, both actors and designers. However, he reserved the right to say "make another choice," which he did sometimes even after approving a cue. Everything existed for the sake of the play or musical or revue. It may have been the right idea perfectly executed, but maybe something changed and the cue no longer fit.
By this point, I'd worked with Joe, my engineer/editor, on several shows. We were a good team, and he was relentless to get a cue to sound perfect. I decided that I wanted a distinct sound for each of the assassins' guns. It wasn't so much that the audience needed to tell them apart as it was, to me, a matter of history. Joe liked the idea and we exhausted a couple of sound libraries to get the different sounds. The elusive one was for JFK.
We found the sound of the make and model of the rifle used in Dallas, but it wasn't strong enough. I wasn't being morbid; rather, this was the assassination that most people in the audience would have remembered. It wouldn't be enough to kill President Kennedy. The audience would have been familiar with a lot of what happened, but the sound of the shot itself hadn't been recorded.
We'd developed several nicely squirm-making sounds for a hanging (breaking a watermelon and enhancing the sound) and for an electric chair execution (the sounds from an old horror movie lab), both of which were successes in my estimation...they added to the scene and, since the actual hanging and electric chair deaths were done in blackout, the melons' snaps and the electric zaps helped the audience make their own visuals.
One of the more pleasant challenges was finding the individual gun sounds. One prop gun would be covered by a kerchief: would that muffle the sound? One was a small, cheap gun used by a very scatterbrained woman. The small gun sound was easy and we made it kind of staccato because it seemed to describe her.
The second-hardest sound was John Wilkes Booth's handgun. I think it was the first gunshot heard in the show. Joe and I agreed that everyone has heard gunfire, whether on TV or for real, so it wasn't a matter of introducing anyone to that sound. It was, however, a statement of character. Was it the same gun that killed Lincoln? Probably no one thought about that, but we felt it justified a loud, resonant shot. It was not just that he committed suicide with the gun; he killed the country.
The same could be said for Lee Harvey Oswald. The trouble was that there wasn't really much of a "special" sound for a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Nothing particularly sinister and certainly nothing to suggest an assassination rifle. We agreed that the shot (a single shot in the show) needed to stir up emotions from 50 years before. It had to make the audience think of the TV news clips they saw. It had to be the shot that killed a dream. We also agreed that it was the show's climax, at least as far as sound was concerned.
We spent two hours working on that sound. We wound up not using the sound of the Mannlicher-Carcano because we found a deeper sounding shot. We layered it so that it lasted longer than the real shot, gave it a good bit of bass and reverb, a hint of treble, but it really did take a long time to tweak and remove and add. And at one point, we looked at each other and smiled. That was the one.
It certainly achieved the desired effect. People gasped, some burst into tears, some cradled their head in their hand, some looked terrified...and, to be fair, some looked like they were watching a show. It didn't steal the show, it didn't detract from any of the actors' performances, but it was a vital part of the show. The shot is at a specific point in the music. I followed the music score so I could hit the gunfire exactly on cue for every performance.
Nothing is real in theater, and sound once was the least convincing of any of the arts used in the creation of a play. The sound designer is presented with the same questions the other designers have to answer. So often to me, sound seemed to be treated as an afterthought or a burden. Thunder is thunder. Birds are birds. Traffic is traffic. Except, of course, it's not. The sound of firing the rifle that killed President Kennedy could have been an effect found in the sound library, but it would never have had the same impact. It is my favorite example of creating a sound for a play.
