BOOTH

Was John Wilkes Booth a mad thespian, crowning himself in the drama of assassination? Robertson's portrait shows a man convinced of the rightness of all his acts, reveling in his part in the world as a stage. For the young photographer, Suratt, he presented enchantment and disillusion. The aging Surratt, surrounded by diaries and trial transcripts, debates telling Booth's story and his own part in it for a D.W. Griffith movie (thus, symbolically encompassing both occupations). With his steady journalistic tones, Herrmann gives little depth to the youth or (with quavering tones) the old man. Instead, music furnishes some odd emotional emphasis. The result is a diminishing of Robertson's rather elegiac atmosphere. S.B.S. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 98]