About the work
Assassins is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by John Weidman. It premiered Off-Broadway in 1990; the acclaimed 2004 Broadway premiere won the Tony Award for Best Revival. In the form of a savage revue, the work assembles the assassins and would-be assassins of U.S. presidents across history and asks uncomfortable questions about the dark side of the American dream – one of Sondheim's most provocative and bleak works.
Plot
At an eerie fairground, a booth proprietor invites passers-by to grab a gun and shoot a president. From different eras, nine real assassins come together – from John Wilkes Booth, the killer of Abraham Lincoln, through Leon Czolgosz and Charles Guiteau to Lee Harvey Oswald, Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley. In songs, monologues and absurd encounters they lay out their motives: bitterness, delusion, obsessive love, craving for recognition and the promise that in America everyone has a right to their happiness – and their deed. The characters egg one another on across time, until they all gather in the Dallas book depository and press Oswald to fire.
Cultural significance
Assassins is one of music theatre's boldest reckonings with violence, fame and the dark underside of the American promise. Sondheim traces a musical arc through U.S. history, from marches and folk to pop ballads, forcing the audience to listen to the perpetrators without excusing them. Long deemed too disturbing for Broadway, the show is today regarded as a classic and a disquietingly clear-sighted commentary on radicalisation and aggrieved entitlement.