Assassins (1990)

“In Assassins, a daring work even by his lights, Mr. Sondheim and his collaborator, the writer John Weidman, say the unthinkable, though they sometimes do so in a deceptively peppy musical-comedy tone. Without exactly asking that the audience sympathize with some of the nation’s most notorious criminals, this show insists on reclaiming them as products, however defective, of the same values and traditions as the men they tried to murder. To Mr. Sondheim, the dreams of Presidential assassins seem not so much different from those empty all-American dreams of stardom he enshrined in Gypsy: these killers want to grab headlines, get the girl, or see their names in lights. […]

One need not agree with Mr. Sondheim’s cynical view of history and humanity to feel that Assassins has the potential to be an extraordinarily original piece of theater. In its Off Broadway premiere, unfortunately, that potential is unfulfilled. [….]

Mr. Sondheim’s better numbers in Assassins do aspire to the highest standard and not infrequently meet it. As the show as a whole attempts to rewrite American history, so the composer audaciously attempts to rewrite the history of American music. This is an anti-musical about anti-heroes. Every song upends a traditional native form: folk music, spirituals and John Philip Sousa are all rethought along with Broadway idioms and the official national musical oratory of Irving Berlin and Francis Scott Key. […]

Brilliant as these songs can be individually, they never cohere into a fully realized score that builds in cumulative effect the way most of the later Sondheim scores do. […]

But Mr. Sondheim has real guts. He isn’t ashamed to identify with his assassins to the extreme point where he will wave a gun in a crowded theater, artistically speaking, if that’s what is needed to hit the target of American complacency. While that target is a valuable one, especially at this historical moment, Assassins will have to fire with sharper aim and fewer blanks if it is to shoot to kill. ” – Frank Rich, The New York Times (1991)

“Joe Mantello’s flawless production makes your skin crawl even as it seduces you — and should redeem a prime place for this disquieting musical in the canon of the American theater’s reigning master of the form. Sondheim has always been an artist concerned more with clouds than silver linings. While most Broadway musicals are designed to disseminate the intoxicating feeling of dreams coming true, Sondheim prefers to explore the long moment after, when the prize so enthusiastically pursued turns out to be a shoddy piece of goods. Assassins is his most scabrous commentary yet on the poisoned chalice of romantic illusions. […]

That’s its strength: Rather than a standard musical-comedy score that draws variety from a show’s narrative progression, Sondheim’s writing for Assassins is an artfully conceived, cohesive whole, almost a single piece of music composed of theme and variations. It’s an oratorio that knits together more than a century of American musical styles, from marches and 19th-century folk ballads to ’70s pop, into a single tapestry.” – Charles Isherwood, Variety (2004)

“I can’t imagine that anyone who sees Assassins will have the slightest desire to emulate its characters. But leave it to Mr. Sondheim to identify certain emotional poisons — feelings of dispossession and disillusion, of failure and alienation — as chemicals that exist in small quantities in every human body. Mr. Sondheim magnifies those elements to monstrous proportions, and your being able to recognize them as familiar makes their presence in these looming, distorted forms all the scarier. […]

Mr. Sondheim’s astonishing score takes staples of American folk, pop and ceremonial music and turns them inside out. The sly distortions of familiar musical tropes — whether ”Hail to the Chief” or a barbershop quartet — approximate the skewed ways in which these characters hear everyday melodies. Listening, as sweet notes slide into dissonance, you may feel as if your own brain has slipped off the rails.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times (2004)

“The bigger, painfully timely question posed by this new revival (now playing at Classic Stage Company) is: Are we now so jaded as a nation that this modern classic has lost some of its shock value after 30 years?  And the answer is: Nope. Between the musical’s powerful content and Doyle’s inventive presentation, Assassins is still a killer show. […]

The sheer cynicism of the opening number that introduces the nine assassins can take your breath away: So much anger in the insidious music, such profound despair in the fevered lyrics! According to the Proprietor (the formidable Eddie Cooper) of the show’s bizarre carnival world, “Everybody’s got the right to be happy / Everybody’s got the right to their dreams.” So far, so good. But the song doesn’t stop there: A free country, it promises us, “means your dreams can come true” — a sentiment too often misconstrued as meaning “your dreams will come true.” That’s the dangerous misinterpretation of the freedom to dream that brings all those angry assassins to the stage — and to life.” – Marilyn Stasio, Variety (2021)